Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion
<p>German mathematician Johannes Kepler and his journey to finding the laws that govern modern-day understanding of planetary motion began with Kepler’s banishment from Graz, Austria in the early 17th century due to religious and political conflicts. Kepler would find an opportunity to work with prominent astronomer Tycho Brahe. Brahe, however, saw Kepler as a threat to his reputation as the leading astronomer of the generation. He gave Kepler the task of understanding the orbit of Mars, the planet that most contradicted the current understanding of the structure of the solar system. Many believe Brahe gave the task to Kepler knowing its difficulty in the hopes of distracting his young intern while Brahe finalized his geocentric theory of the solar system. Brahe believed Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn all orbited the Sun, which in turn, orbited the Earth. Kepler, however, was a firm believer in Copernicus’s heliocentric model of our solar system, in which every planet revolves around the Sun. Data extracted from Mars’s orbit contradicted Copernicus’s heliocentric model because of the incorrect assumption that the planets orbited the Sun in a circular path.</p>
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