Uncovering the Intrinsic Shapes of Elliptical Galaxies. IV. Tests on Simulated Merger Remnants

Abstract

We test the methods developed in previous papers for inferring the intrinsic shapes of elliptical galaxies, using simulated objects from N-body experiments. The shapes of individual objects are correctly reproduced to within the statistical errors; close inspection of the results indicates a small systematic bias in the sense of underestimating both the triaxiality and short-to-long axis ratio. We also test the estimation of parent shape distributions, using samples of independent, randomly oriented objects. The best results are statistically accurate, but on average the parent distributions are again slightly biased in the same sense. Using the posterior probability densities for the individual objects, we estimate the magnitude of the bias to be less than approximately 0.1 in both shape parameters. The results support the continued use of these methods on real systems.

Astrophysical Journal, accepted. 10 pages, incl. 4 figs. AASTeX 4.0. Paper with better quality figures in PDF format at http://www.phy.ohiou.edu/~tss/Uncov4.pdf

References in corpus (4)

• Dynamical Evolution of Elliptical Galaxies with Central Singularities
• The Stellar Kinematic Fields of NGC 3379
• The Three-Dimensional Mass Distribution in NGC 1700
• Streamlines of the Mean Stellar Motions in Elliptical Galaxies

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• Long-Lived Triaxiality in the Dynamically Old Elliptical Galaxy NGC 4365: A Limit on Chaos and Black Hole Mass
• The intrinsic shape of bulges in the CALIFA survey