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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2017
New insights in the structure of elliptical galaxies have been obtained indicating the presence of faint stellar disks in some of these systems. Clear correlations between the isophotal shapes, the kinematic, radio and X-ray properties of disky E's were found, suggesting that these galaxies form together with SO's a continuous transition of D/B ratio in the Hubble sequence (Bender et al. 1989). The isophotal shapes of these galaxies have been quantified by the fourth cosine coefficient a 4 of the Fourier expansion of the deviations from perfect ellipses, which yields positive values when the isophotes are pointed along the major axis (Carter 1987, Lauer 1985, Jedrzewski 1987, Bender and Möllenhoff 1987).