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M. Weinberg (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
The Milky Way, like most spiral galaxies, exhibit arms, bars, satellites and other large-scale asymmetries that may hold the keys to understanding its evolutionary history. The 2MASS full-sky coverage and the relatively low extinction at J, H and K\prime is ideal for targeted structure studies. I will illustrate the overall features of the Point Source Catalog and describe preliminary star-count studies in the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud. The promise of this huge catalog will continue to be enhanced by adding data from other surveys. Although information theory tells us that our statistical confidence and inferential ability is increased adding more data, standard techniques quickly become intractable. Realization of these data riches will require new computationally optimized methods for theory--data statistical analyses and I will outline some recent progress.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: weinberg@astro.umass.edu