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Session 41 - Elliptical Galaxies.
Display session, Tuesday, January 14
Metropolitan Ballroom,
One of the outstanding questions in galaxy evolution is how mergers transform galaxies. Numerical simulations suggest that many types of mergers may produce a galaxy with a mass profile similar to that of an elliptical galaxy. To study the role of mergers in galaxy evolution, we obtained optical and near-infrared images of a unique sample of isolated elliptical galaxies. Our sample includes all the ellipticals in the RC3 with z < 0.03 that do not lie within a projected radius of 1h^-1 Mpc or 2000 km s^-1 from any other galaxy. We have used the imaging data to verify the galaxy morphologies and to search for the morphological signatures of recent mergers, such as tidal features, shells and dust lanes.
