THE MORPHOLOGY OF ELLIPTIC GALAXIES INDIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

For six years, Jean-Luc Nieto and his team studied the morphology of e lliptical galaxies in different environments, essentially by isophote shape analysis, in order to understand their true nature : compact ell ipticals in hierarchical pairs or isolated, elongated ellipticals, ell ipticals in the Perseus and Coma clusters, cores of ellipticals. One o f their main results was the confirmation that ellipticals fall into t wo physically distinct classes, boxy and disky objects.