Kepler's laws

plural noun

1. three laws of planetary motion published by Johannes Kepler between 1609 and 1619. The first states that the orbit of a planet describes an ellipse with the sun at one focus. The second states that, during one orbit, the straight line joining the sun and a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times. The third states that the squares of the periods of any two planets are proportional to the cubes of their orbital major axes

Example Sentences

"Over decades, Tycho Brahe collected astronomical observations from which Kepler, with lots of trial and error, was able to extract Kepler's Laws. Dion used machines to do with waves what Kepler did with planets. For me, it is still shocking that something like this is possible," says Markus Jochum.

From Science Daily

The slight difference in the position of Mars against the background stars seen from the two ends of this baseline made it possible to work out the distance to Mars, and this, combined with Kepler’s laws, gave the diameters of the orbits of all the planets.

From Literature

The three Fellows agreed that Kepler’s laws of motion implied that the centrifugal force ‘pushing’ planets outwards from the Sun must be inversely proportional to the squares of their distances from the Sun, and that therefore, in order for the planets to stay in their orbits, they must be attracted by the Sun by an equivalent force which cancelled out the centrifugal force.

From Literature

He also noted, though, from Kepler’s laws, that the ‘endeavours of receding from the Sun’ of the planets in their orbits were inversely proportional to the squares of their distances from the Sun.

From Literature

It’s no surprise, really, that Kepler only achieved the stature he deserves in the eyes of historians after just such a mathematician, Isaac Newton, used Kepler’s laws in combination with his own theory of gravity to explain how the planets moved in elliptical orbits.

From Literature