Testing for triaxiality with kinematic data

Simple kinematical models of elliptical galaxies are used to show that if elliptical galaxies are triaxial, rotational velocities along their apparent major axes must be associated with similar motions along their apparent minor axes. The relative magnitudes of these velocities indicate the degree to which elliptical galaxies deviate from the classical picture of them as oblate figures of rotation. An analysis of the observational data for 10 galaxies that have been studied along both isophotal principal axes suggests that a typical elliptical galaxy is probably far from being axisymmetric, but rather has a middle-axis length about equal to the average of the lengths of the longest and shortest axes. (author)