| Abstract: | While not specifically designed to do so, the WISE Survey permits searches for young stars without the spatial limits of previous work with Spitzer, with orders of magnitude greater depth than IRAS and with greater sensitivity to young disks than 2MASS. With careful treatment of the catalog and selection criteria based on known classes of stars and galaxies, we have developed a scheme that can find and characterize young stars in the WISE catalog across the whole sky. We demonstrate how this can be used to reveal key information about the large scale distribution of star formation and explore the fundamental scaling relations between gas and star formation in galaxies from a Milky Way perspective. |