TOP 10 MOMENTS IN ASTRONOMYRobert Lamb, HowStuffWorks.com
'Revolution'ary Johannes Kepler and a depiction of his law that bodies -- on an elliptical orbit -- cover more distance and move faster when closest to the object they're orbiting. Credit: Library of Congress/NASA
9. Kepler Calculates Cosmic Mechanics Johannes Kepler, now heralded as the father of celestial mechanics, believed that the language of God was geometry. No surprise, then, that the 16th century astronomer set out to understand stars movement through a devout application of mathematics. With a little help, Kepler eventually proved that the planets' orbits were elliptical -- not perfect circles as astronomers once believed them to be. Kepler also figured out that the speed of anything orbiting the sun changes predictably according to distance from the sun (the closer, the faster). We now call his findings Kepler's Laws and, when it came to planet-sun distance, the tables Kepler created were 10 times more accurate than those of Copernicus. |
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Want more? Click here for the rest of the Wide Angle: 400 Years of Astronomy. Credit: IYA2009
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