INFERRING GALAXY VIEWING ANGLES

The kinematic structure of remnants produced from major mergers of dis k progenitors is examined. In particular, we consider moments of the p rojected velocity held and quantify departures of the line profiles fr om Gaussianity using a Gauss-Hermite expansion. By averaging over circ ular apertures, we are able to show that the line profiles exhibit sig nificant deviations from Gaussianity and, of greater interest, we find that the high-order moments correlate with viewing angle. This effect appears to be a natural consequence of the orbital structure of equil ibrium triaxial systems. The correlations in our models appear suffici ently tight that it may be possible, in principle, to infer viewing an gles from observations, provided that the kinematics of the remnants i n our simulations are representative of those of actual elliptical gal axies. Observational tests of our scheme are proposed, and possible ap plications of the technique to the study of intrinsic properties of ga laxies and clusters are discussed.