Star formation activities dominate the evolution of galaxies. Elliptical galaxies are believed to be old galaxies in the Hubble sequence, and elliptical galaxies at different evolution epochs might have different star formation activities and/or morphologies. We investigate the connection between star formation rates and the morphology of elliptical galaxies. With the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Galaxy Zoo, we select a sample of elliptical galaxies by morphology and consider their infrared emission as an index of star formation rate to study the relation between the star formation rates and their morphological properties, such as ellipticities. In addition, we select some nearby spiral galaxies with very low MIR emission to probe the mechanisms of these red spiral galaxies. We display our preliminary results and discuss their implication on the evolution of galaxies in this poster.
We construct a simple photometric evolution model of galaxies based on the evolutionary population synthesis. In our models an exponentially decreasing SFR with a power law IMF is used to compute the UBV colors of galaxies from ellipticals to late type spirals. It is shown that the integrated colors of galaxies with different Hubble type can be explained by one parameter, SFR.