标题： 什么因素最能限制本星系群中的星系演化？ 显示英文标题

标题： What best constrains galaxy evolution in the local Universe?

摘要： 在一篇关于天体物理学家面对主导理论模型和大量高信息量数据时应开展何种恰当工作的争论性引言之后，我回顾了一些近期关于附近宇宙（红移为十分之一）星系性质的研究成果，这些成果直接与物理宇宙学相关。在其中一个例子中，我展示了有多种方式可以测量或者对大规模星系-星系主并合率进行强有力的限制，而当前一代模型对此的预测存在有限的不确定性。在另一个例子中，我表明我们可以超越单个星系属性与“环境”之间的“相关性”。我们的研究结果表明，对环境密度敏感的是星系的恒星形成历史——而不是它们的形态。我期待着未来，或许并不遥远，在这个未来里，这些研究成果能够引导我们对理论假设进行根本性的修正，尽管我担心主导范式可能不需要被颠覆。 显示英文摘要

摘要： After a polemical introduction about the proper activity of an astrophysicist facing a dominant theoretical model and many Tb of highly informative data, I review a few recent results on the properties of galaxies in the nearby (redshift one-tenth) Universe that directly bear on physical cosmology. In one example, I show that there are a number of ways of measuring, or strongly constraining, massive galaxy-galaxy major merger rates, which are predicted with limited uncertainties in the current generation of models. In another, I show that we can go beyond "correlations" between individual galaxy properties and "environment". Our results show that it is galaxy star-formation histories--not their morphologies--that are sensitive to environmental density. I look forward to a future, perhaps not that far away, in which these results guide a fundamental modification to our theoretical assumptions, though I fear that the dominant paradigm may not require subversion.