On the Shapes and Structures of High-Redshift Compact Galaxies
  Recent deep Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 imaging suggests that a majority of
compact quiescent massive galaxies at z~2 may contain disks. To investigate
this claim, we have compared the ellipticity distribution of 31 carefully
selected high-redshift massive quiescent compact galaxies to a set of
mass-selected ellipticity and Sersic index distributions obtained from 2D
structural fits to ~40,000$ nearby galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test shows that the distribution of ellipticities for the
high-redshift galaxies is consistent with the ellipticity distribution of a
similarly chosen sample of massive early-type galaxies. However the
distribution of Sersic indices for the high-redshift sample is inconsistent
with that of local early-type galaxies, and instead resembles that of local
disk-dominated populations. The mismatch between the properties of
high-redshift compact galaxies and those of both local early-type and
disk-dominated systems leads us to conclude that the basic structures of
high-redshift compact galaxies probably do not closely resemble those of any
single local galaxy population. Any galaxy population analog to the
high-redshift compact galaxies that exists at the current epoch is either a mix
of different types of galaxies, or possibly a unique class of objects on their
own.
