My senior research paper is coming up and I need a good topic for next week. The essay has to be a problem solution. I was hoping to find a problem in the realm of astronomy.

Can anyone help? Are there any problems in astronomy that can be solve with fairly average research? Also, take into account I'm only 17 and a senior in high school. Try not to mention things that would be too far out of my reach while researching.

Thanks in advance.

I doubt there are any unsolved astronomy problems that a 17 year old could easily research and solve. I could be wrong.

Presumably part of the test is for you to come up with a good topic to research. On your own.

Grant Hutchison

There are some tiny problems you might tackle, like trying to find the mass and size of various types of asteroids without actually sending probes to see them close up. How could you do it? What would you need?

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Forming opinions as we speak

Thanks guys, but its more of a big problem. I was thinking something more along the lines of.......there isn't enough money going into space exploration today. And the solution can be, more money can be put into it. At least my teacher said that idea was good.

Something more along the lines of a social topic.

We'd all like to see more money out into space exploration. How are you going to convince John Q. Public that their tax dollars need to go to space instead of cutting their taxes? When you get done with your paper send copies to Washington. A high school senior may have more sense than those great minds we put there.

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

What type of research are we talking here?

Book research, elbow grease and creativity?

or actual "science" observe, classify, etc...

For the "science" section your work doesn't have to be completely original you know. A lot of papers are published that are merely slight variations of eachother. They're done to check to see if previous work is correct.

Say someone says alpha centauri is a binary star...somebody else checks that (slightly different method, sometimes part of a different study) and publishes.

Book research.