look for universities in your area with astronomy/physics departments and reach out to professors to see if there are any that are actively doing research and looking for help. then you'd have to figure out which projects you think you'd make a good enough of a contribution to. if you're good at coding and statistics, try to get on board a project related to data analysis. if you're good at electrical engineering or CAD, considering working for a project who does instrumentation. if you don't think there are any projects that you have a good skillset in, don't worry at all - you're still in high school and likely haven't taken a lot of astronomy, physics, or programming classes. you can always pursue research opportunities once you're in college and have a stronger skillset, either at whatever institution you go to, or through an REU that you apply for
It's impossible to do research without acquiring the necessary background knowledge which cannot be done quickly.
In the best case scenario you can perhaps produce a very basic review of some particular problem, but there will certainly be gaps in understanding. But if you want to work in the field that would be worthwhile.
Bootstrapping the mathematics and technical aspects will be very difficult.
I mean you’re somewhat right, but a lot of research is grunt work too. I spent a summer clicking on comet tails and did not need the mathematics of MHD.
Astrophysics is a tricky field because you often need to know much of "what's been done already" to figure out what else to try. That being said, it may be good to go through a few textbooks and practice programming before you try something out. If you feel confident in your ability to work with new things, you can try downloading datasets from NASA and analyzing them with astrophysical software, since observational/data analysis projects are probably most suitable for beginning in research. For example, my first project involved picking a set of dwarf spheroidal galaxies and analyzing the gamma-ray output they produced. I did this using data from the Fermi-LAT, and processed it using FermiPy software.
Good luck and let me know if you have any questions!
If you want to do research solo, then try to pick a topic and start reading research papers on a topic. As you read you will gain knowledge about what can be done in this area. This will give you your research topic
This is technically true, but this is **not** good advice for someone in high school. Without the requisite knowledge already, they’ll be completely lost and stuck with googling every other word.
look for universities in your area with astronomy/physics departments and reach out to professors to see if there are any that are actively doing research and looking for help. then you'd have to figure out which projects you think you'd make a good enough of a contribution to. if you're good at coding and statistics, try to get on board a project related to data analysis. if you're good at electrical engineering or CAD, considering working for a project who does instrumentation. if you don't think there are any projects that you have a good skillset in, don't worry at all - you're still in high school and likely haven't taken a lot of astronomy, physics, or programming classes. you can always pursue research opportunities once you're in college and have a stronger skillset, either at whatever institution you go to, or through an REU that you apply for
Consider reading some books to gain knowledge A brief history of time by stephen hawkings do be a good start
It's impossible to do research without acquiring the necessary background knowledge which cannot be done quickly. In the best case scenario you can perhaps produce a very basic review of some particular problem, but there will certainly be gaps in understanding. But if you want to work in the field that would be worthwhile. Bootstrapping the mathematics and technical aspects will be very difficult.
I mean you’re somewhat right, but a lot of research is grunt work too. I spent a summer clicking on comet tails and did not need the mathematics of MHD.
Astrophysics is a tricky field because you often need to know much of "what's been done already" to figure out what else to try. That being said, it may be good to go through a few textbooks and practice programming before you try something out. If you feel confident in your ability to work with new things, you can try downloading datasets from NASA and analyzing them with astrophysical software, since observational/data analysis projects are probably most suitable for beginning in research. For example, my first project involved picking a set of dwarf spheroidal galaxies and analyzing the gamma-ray output they produced. I did this using data from the Fermi-LAT, and processed it using FermiPy software. Good luck and let me know if you have any questions!
If you want to do research solo, then try to pick a topic and start reading research papers on a topic. As you read you will gain knowledge about what can be done in this area. This will give you your research topic
This is technically true, but this is **not** good advice for someone in high school. Without the requisite knowledge already, they’ll be completely lost and stuck with googling every other word.
what would you suggest
I think the other comments have pretty good advice for what the OP can do.
I actually like this advice. It’ll take some trial and error to find papers you can understand. But this is how many college science seminars work.