Kepler's laws

British  

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

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Example Sentences

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Kepler's laws

Newton’s universal law of gravitation and Kepler’s laws describe the motions of Earth satellites and interplanetary spacecraft as well as the planets.

From Textbooks ● Oct. 13, 2016

We have seen that Kepler’s laws, which do not take into account the gravitational effects of the other planets on an orbit, really work quite well.

From Textbooks ● Oct. 13, 2016

But we can measure the distance to many other solar system objects and use Kepler’s laws to give us the distance to the Sun.

From Textbooks ● Oct. 13, 2016

Kepler’s laws showed that Copernicus’s basic ideas were true.

From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2012

You may think that this is simply because Galileo’s law is incomplete: Newton’s theory of gravity provides an explanation both of Galileo’s law of fall and of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

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