You may ask "What can a hard headed statistician offer to a starry eyed astronomer?"
The answer is, "Plenty." One normally associates statistics with large numbers, and
astronomy is full of large numbers. The number of stars in our galaxy, the so-called
Milky Way System, is more than a hundred thousand million. The number of galaxies
in ihe observable universe is upwards of a thousand million. Surely these large numbers
justify a priffkz-/ade ease for the use of statistical techniques! ♦,♦ I have every reason to
believe that increased interaction between statistics and astronomy will be Lo the benefit
of both the subjects.
— X V.Narlikar
The last half of the twentieth century saw cosmology develop into a very active
and diverse field of science. This was largely due to the development of observa-
observational techniques that allowed astronomers to observe extremely distant regions
of space, This motivated a flow of new theories about the evolution of our uni-
universe and the formation of the large-scale structure we found in it. The main tools
to compare theoretical results with observations in astronomy are statistical, so
the new theories and observations also initiated an active use of spatial statistics
in cosmology.
statistical methods used in the analysis of the large-scale distribution.