New Projections of Triaxiality

: An elliptical galaxy is considered to consist of a triaxial luminous stellar distribution embedded in a triaxial "dark" halo. Differences in the triaxialities lead to kinematic misalignments, X-ray isophote twists, and gravitational lens model misalignments. We have numerically projected the X-ray emission of a model stellar and halo potential and compared it to the luminous galaxy projection for a variety of viewing angles. The two projections generally show a small misalignment, with an X-ray isophote twist of ¸ 5 ffi occurring near the effective radius. The large misalignment observed in NGC 720 could not be well fit, suggesting that it requires an intrinsic misalignment of the halo and the galaxy. Both the stellar distributions (e.g. Franx, Illingworth, & de Zeeuw 1991) and the dark matter halos (Dubinski & Carlberg 1991; Warren et al. 1992) of elliptical galaxies are now believed to be triaxial. A triaxial galaxy produces some observable signatures: an optical isophote twist b..