Today in class they mentioned that ellipticals are found at large z / early time in high density galaxy clusters, that the intracluster gas was too hot to form new stars, and that the chaotic angular momentum in the elipticals meant they would not be re-accreting back to disks any time soon. (Supposedly they have small rings at their cores?)

How "none" is the formation of stars and planetary systems in ellipticals? If some margins did have conditions to support occasional planetary systems, would they be inevitably and invariably too saturated in nearby x-rays for life as we know it? And how does the mass density probabilities of Earth forming a significant distance away from large clusters with violent EM factor into the tiny odds of evolved consciousness? I don't recall that the Rare Earth book discriminated between the odds of Earth forming in a pristine accretion disk versus forming in a chaotic elliptical.

Also - if the class points are correct - I'm trying to wrap my head around the pristine character of accretion disks themselves vis-a-vis ellipticals that have such chaotic angular momentum. Does this cause any degree of uniqueness to the fact of accretion disks forming? Or in other words, can we say that accretion disks are a direct function of the BB and the decoupling which left matter at a certain kind of 'tiredness' where it had only vanishingly trivial angular momentum to begin with, so that it was 'more easily compelled' to align itself with other angular momenta into an accretion disk? Can we say that ellipticals could have formed immediately out of decoupled overdensities _Without_ having gone through the stage of accretion disk digestion? I have this question residing in the same class or category as the question of why we don't see red dwarfs any older than 1/nth of their total possible lifespan...