Astrophysics???????

i really want to study astrophysics (kinda a rocket scientest)


i would like to know how many years would i have to take in college to get your Phd and what would be the absolute best college??





serious answers only .





im very fascinate by the stars and space.|||Well, astrophysics is a really general field. If you want to literally be a rocket scientist, going to Caltech is your best bet because they sort of own JPL, or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. If you want to study gravitational waves, then you want to go to UF or one of the other LIGO/LISA collaborators. It takes roughly 5 years to get a PhD, but that depends on what you are studying. If you want to do straight up astronomy, you definately want to go to Arizona or Illinois because they have really good obsevatories. Another thing you need to think about is if you want to do experimental or theoretical astrophysics. Experimental would be LIGO/LISA if you know anything about those programs, and theoretical would be stellar evolution, binary black hole systems, so on and so forth. Right now I am thinking about grad school for astrophysics as well, and UF is looking like a really good option because they are well funded, they have a good astrophysics program, and I don't feel intimidated as I would at a really prestigeous university, like MIT. Hope this helps.|||You would need to spend 4 years at an undergraduate school to get a degree in physics or astrophysics, and then another 3 or 4 years in graduate school to get your doctoral degree (depending on whether you start graduate work at college).





The best schools for astronomy and astrophysics are the schools you would go to in general anyway - Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Cornell, and Yale all have good astronomy programs, but a lot of college professors recommend that you do your undergraduate degree in physics and keep your options open, so consider schools like RPI that do not have full astronomy programs for undergraduates but do offer a good physics curriculum with the chance to concentrate in astrophysics.|||I took 11 years to go from High School to a Ph.D. in Physics.





I messed around a great deal, but I had a great time doing it.





My best advice I have ever heard or given about school is try to only take classes you like, or you may wind up qualified for a high paying job that you will really hate.





By the way most rocket scientists are actually engineers.|||4 years|||just writing to say thanks to Max