Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion can be summarized as follows:
- Kepler’s first law: Each planet moves around the Sun in an orbit that is an ellipse,
with the Sun at one focus of the ellipse.
- Kepler’s second law: The straight line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal
areas in space in equal intervals of time.
- Kepler’s third law: The square of a planet’s orbital period is directly proportional to
the cube of the semimajor axis of its orbit.
Kepler’s three laws provide a precise geometric description of planetary motion within the
framework of the Copernican system. With these tools, it was possible to calculate planetary
positions with greatly improved precision. Still, Kepler’s laws are purely descriptive: they do not
help us understand what forces of nature constrain the planets to follow this particular set of rules.
That step was left to Isaac Newton.
This article is a derivative work of the creative commons share alike with attribution in
[1].
References
[1] Fraknoi, Andrew, David Morrison, and Sidney Wolff. The Sky Above. In Astronomy
2e. Houston, Texas : OpenStax, 2022. The Sky Above
