FRACTAL DIMENSIONS OF GALAXIES

This project concentrated on separating elliptical galaxies from spiral galaxies. As discussed in chapter 2, the intensity of the galaxies falls off as one moves away from the center. Therefore, in order to find the fractal dimensions for a galaxy, one could divide the entire intensity range of the galaxy into finite steps, extract contours around each of these steps and find fractal dimensions for each contour. A plot of fractal dimensions versus the intensity step can then be generated which would be the fractal dimensions for the entire galaxy. As the elliptical galaxies, in general, have relatively less complex structure, one could expect such a plot to have lower values compared to a plot for a spiral galaxy.