DR. ARUN KUMAR SINGH

Determination of intrinsic shapes of the individual elliptical galaxies using photometry is an important problem because the number of galaxies with good photometry is many more than those with good kinematics. We find that the variation in shape can be estimated, using photometry alone. We determine the intrinsic shapes of the light distribution of elliptical galaxies combining the profiles of photometric data from the literature with triaxial models. We use ensembles of models so that the shape estimates are largely model independent. We use a flat prior and then modified prior as obtained from the shape estimates of a large sample of elliptical galaxies to determine the intrinsic shapes of the elliptical galaxies.