Determining a galaxy’s 3D shape While spiral galaxies tend to be small, rotate quickly and have a well-recognized pancake shape, giant elliptical galaxies rotate slowly and have a blobby ...

Elliptical galaxies lack the swirling arms of their more well-known siblings, spiral galaxies. Instead, they bear the rounded shape of an ellipse, a stretched-out circle. One of the most famous ...

While working on his book The Grapes of Math, Bellos became fascinated by the ellipse. “The shape has these wonderful geometrical properties that we’ve known about since the ancient Greeks ...