Spectral Classification of Galaxies

Abstract

We investigate the integrated spectra of a sample of 24 normal galaxies. A principal component analysis suggests that most of the variance present in the spectra is due to the differences in morphology of the galaxies in the sample. We show that spectroscopic parameters extracted from the spectra, like the amplitude of the 4000 Å~ break or of the CN band, correlate well with Hubble types and are useful for quantitative classification.