What Can Polar Ring Galaxies Tell Us About The Flattening Of The Dark Halo?
|Proceedings Title||Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society|
|Conference Name||American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #109.09|
|Date||December 1, 2007|
|Library Catalog||NASA ADS|
|Abstract||In a polar ring system, a ring of gas, dust and stars orbits almost over the pole of a central `host’ that is generally a gas-poor S0 or elliptical galaxy. Gas orbits in the ring and stellar orbits in the host galaxy sample the gravitational potential in two near-orthogonal planes. I will discuss how polar rings can be used as a rare probe of the shape of the galaxy's unseen halo. Results for nearby polar rings point to a wide dispersion in shape, from a nearly round halo to a halo that is almost as flattened as the luminous disk. I would like to thank the National Science Foundation and UW-Madison for their support of my work on polar ring galaxies.|