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    HP5 Kepler SLaws

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    The document discusses Kepler's three laws of planetary motion, which improved upon the previous idea that planets orbit in perfect circles around the Sun. Kepler determined through geometric analysis of Tycho Brahe's observations of Mercury that planets actually orbit in ellipses with the Sun at one focus. The document instructs the reader to replicate Kepler's analysis and derive his laws.

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    HP5 Kepler SLaws

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    The document discusses Kepler's three laws of planetary motion, which improved upon the previous idea that planets orbit in perfect circles around the Sun. Kepler determined through geometric analysis of Tycho Brahe's observations of Mercury that planets actually orbit in ellipses with the Sun at one focus. The document instructs the reader to replicate Kepler's analysis and derive his laws.

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    The document discusses Kepler's three laws of planetary motion, which improved upon the previous idea that planets orbit in perfect circles around the Sun. Kepler determined through geometric analysis of Tycho Brahe's observations of Mercury that planets actually orbit in ellipses with the Sun at one focus. The document instructs the reader to replicate Kepler's analysis and derive his laws.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    47 views2 pages

    HP5 Kepler SLaws

    Uploaded by

    єктα
    The document discusses Kepler's three laws of planetary motion, which improved upon the previous idea that planets orbit in perfect circles around the Sun. Kepler determined through geometric analysis of Tycho Brahe's observations of Mercury that planets actually orbit in ellipses with the Sun at one focus. The document instructs the reader to replicate Kepler's analysis and derive his laws.

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    MATH 261, Spring 2001 Due Date: Name(s):

    Honors Project 3: Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion

    Prior to Johannes Kepler’s (1571-1630) statement of his three Laws of Planetary Motion:

    1. A planet revolves around the Sun in an elliptical orbit with the Sun at one focus.
    2. The line joining the Sun to a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times.
    3. The square of the period of revolution of a planet is proportional to the cube of the length of the major
    axis of its orbit.

    it was thought that the orbits of the planets were circles with the Sun at the center of each.

    Kepler’s approach to his his three laws was actu-


    ally quite geometric. (It was Sir Isaac Newton who
    first showed how Kepler’s laws could be deduced
    from two of his own laws — his Second Law of W

    Motion and his Law of Universal Gravitation — in


    E
    his Principia Mathematica in 1687.) It (Kepler’s
    approach) was based on the fact that if an ob-
    ject travels around a smooth, closed, planar curve
    Observer
    (such as a circle or an ellipse) then, to an observer
    located at a point in the plane of the objects mo-
    tion but outside the curve, the object will appear Figure 1
    to travel to the right, to stop, to travel to the left,
    to stop, and to travel to the right again, after which the (apparent) motion repeats (see Figure 1). A point
    such as E at which the object appears to stop after traveling to the right is called an easterly elongation,
    and a point such as W at which the object appears to stop after traveling to the right is called a westerly
    elongation. January 1

    Kepler assumed that the orbit of the earth was At an easterly elongation.
    a circle with the Sun at its center. He asscoiated
    to each point of the circle a date of the year (see
    Figure 2). He then used Tycho Brahe’s observa-
    October 1 April 1
    tions of the easterly and westerly elongations of
    the planet Mercury — measured as angles as seen
    from the earth, from the Sun to Mercury — to
    draw a set of lines to which he concluded the orbit At a westerly elongation.
    of Mercury must be tangent.
    July 1

    Figure 2
    Obtain data from the Observers’ Handbook, and repeat Kepler’s construction for yourself (using as much
    data as possible). Can you inscribe a circle in the resulting set of lines in such a manner that the circle is
    tangent to each line? If not, what kind of curve can you inscribe? This should give you some insight into
    why Kepler concluded his first law; can you see how he might have arrived at the other two?
    The following Maple code may help: it generates a circle with 12 equally spaced tic-marks:
    > # CircleWithPoints
    > restart: with(plots):
    > Circle := implicitplot(x^2+y^2=1,x=-1..1,y=-1..1,scaling=constrained,axes=none):
    > P := [0,0];
    > N := 12;
    > for i from 1 to N do P := P,[cos(2*Pi*i/N),sin(2*Pi*i/N)]: od:
    > Points := pointplot([P],color=blue,symbol=circle):
    > display(Circle,[Points]);

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