  We study the pants complex of surfaces of infinite type. When $S$ is a
surface of infinite type, the usual definition of the pants graph
$\mathcal{P}(S)$ yields a graph with infinitely many connected-components. In
the first part of our paper, we study this disconnected graph. In particular,
we show that the extended mapping class group $\mathrm{Mod}(S)$ is isomorphic
to a proper subgroup of $\mathrm{Aut}(\mathcal{P})$, in contrast to the
finite-type case where $\mathrm{Mod}(S)\cong \mathrm{Aut}(\mathcal{P}(S))$.
  In the second part of the paper, motivated by the Metaconjecture of Ivanov,
we seek to endow $\mathcal{P}(S)$ with additional structure. To this end, we
define a coarser topology on $\mathcal{P}(S)$ than the topology inherited from
the graph structure. We show that our new space is path-connected, and that its
automorphism group is isomorphic to $\mathrm{Mod}(S)$.
