aasp

Attempts to understand the mechanisms driving galaxy and their structures formation contributed to the formulation of various theoretical models describing this issue. Various scenarios make different predictions regarding the orientation of galaxies within large-scale structures, the distribution of their spins directions, and the alignment between the brightest galaxy in the cluster and the major axis of the structure. For this reason, the study of galaxy orientation provides a observational tool for testing models of their formation and remains a cornerstone of extragalactic astronomy and cosmology. The proper study requires consideration of the fact that galaxies are oblate spheroids with the real axis ratios dependent on the morphological type. However, most of the astronomical data available today lacks this type of information. As a result, a new method of investigation based on the estimated frequency of the occurrence of given morphological types of galaxies may prove to be an alternative. The method was applied to galaxies belonging to the clusters of the Local Supercluster using data from Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The obtained results confirm the theoretically predicted lack of significant alignment of the studied galaxies.