Johannes Kepler's Planetary Motion

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Johannes Kepler was born on December 27, 1571 and died on November 15, 1630. He was a German astronomer that discovered three important laws of planetary motion. The first law of motion was the planets move in elliptical orbits and with the sun at one focus. The second law of motion was the time necessary to traverse any arc of a planetary orbit is proportional to the area of the sector between the central body and the arc. The third law was there is an exact relationship between the squares of the planet's' periodic times and the cubes or the radii of their orbits. Kepler did not refers to these discoveries as "laws" but as celestial harmonies the reflected God's design for the universe. Scientist believed that the planets in the solar system …show more content…
The sun did not sit exactly in the center of their orbit, but instead it lay of to the side, at one of the two points known as the focus. Some planets, such as earth, had an orbit that was extremely close to a circle. The orbit of Mars was one of the most eccentric, or widely stretched. The fact that planets travel on elliptical path known as Kepler's First Law. Kepler struggled with changes in the velocities of the planets. He figured out that planets move slower when it was farther away from the sun than it did when nearby. He then realized that an invisible line connecting the sun to a planet covered an equal amount of area over the same amount of time. This concept became his second law, along with his first law which he later published in 1609. His third law was published a decade later, and recognized that the relationship between the period of the two planets, the time they take to orbit the sun, is connected to their distance from the sun. The square of the ratio of the period of two planets is equal to the cube of the ratio of their radius. Kepler's first two laws focus on the specifics of a single planet's movement, his third law is focused on a comparison between the orbit of two
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