We report on the discovery of a new correlation between global parameters of the hot interstellar gas in elliptical galaxies. We reanalyze archival Chandra data for 30 normal early-type systems, removing the contributions of resolved and unresolved point sources to reveal the X-ray morphology of the hot gas. We determine the half-light radius, R_X, and the mean surface brightness, I_X, from the gas surface brightness profiles. A spectral analysis determines the temperature, T_X, of the gas within 3 optical effective radii. We find that the galaxies lie on an X-ray Gas Fundamental Plane (XGFP) of the form T_X ~ R_X^{0.28} I_X^{0.22}. This is close to, but distinct from, a simple luminosity-temperature relation. The intrinsic width of the XGFP is only 0.07dex, nearly identical to that of the stellar (optical) fundamental plane (SFP). This is surprising since X-ray gas masses are typically ~10^{-2} of the stellar masses. We show that the XGFP is not a simple consequence of the virial theorem or hydrostatic equilibrium, and that it is essentially independent of the SFP. The XGFP thus represents a genuinely new constraint on the hydrodynamical evolution of elliptical galaxies.

Astrophysical Journal Letters, accepted