What can isolated elliptical galaxies tell us about Cold Dark Matter?

Due to their environment isolated elliptical galaxies (IEs) should not be undergoing extant evolutionary processes yet many IEs have interacting dwarf companions, and where no merger remnants are visible IEs are often dynamically young. Furthermore, some IEs do not require dark matter to explain their dynamics. However, according to Cold Dark Matter (CDM) simulations all elliptical galaxies should be dark matter dominated, even if isolated, and IEs are much rarer in nature than predicted by CDM. Moreover, merging at the ~10⁷ M_⊙ level was recently discovered in the M31 system, showing that hierarchical merging may indeed be scale-free, as predicted by CDM. It seems a natural question to ask: what can IEs tell us about CDM? Here we analyse several IEs as probes of CDM. Our results spawn many new questions.