  We study the properties of the 3-dimensional and projected shapes of haloes
using high resolution numerical simulations and observational data where the
latter comes from the 2PIGG (Eke et al. 2004) and SDSS-DR3GC group catalogues
(Merchan & Zandivarez 2005). We investigate the dependence of halo shape on
characteristics such as mass and number of members. In the 3-dimensional case,
we find a significant correlation between the mass and halo shape; massive
systems are more prolate than small haloes. We detect a source of strong
systematics in estimates of the triaxiality of a halo, which is found to be a
strong function of the number of members; LCDM haloes usually characterised by
triaxial shapes, slightly bent toward prolate forms, appear more oblate when
taking only a small subset of the halo particles. The ellipticities of observed
2PIGG and SDSS-DR3GC groups are found to be strongly dependent on the number of
group members, so that poor groups appear more elongated than rich ones.
However, this is again an artifact caused by poor statistics and not an
intrinsic property of the galaxy groups, nor an effect from observational
biases. We interpret these results with the aid of a GALFORM mock 2PIGG
catalogue. When comparing the group ellipticities in mock and real catalogues,
we find an excellent agreement between the trends of shapes with number of
group members. When carefully taking into account the effects of low number
statistics, we find that more massive groups are consistent with more elongated
shapes. Finally, our studies find no significant correlations between the shape
of observed 2PIGG or SDSS-DR3GC groups with the properties of galaxy members
such as colour or spectral type index.
