Johannes Kepler confirms his previously rejected discovery of the third law of planetary motion (he first discovered it on March 8 but soon rejected the idea after some initial calculations were made).
The elliptical orbits of planets were indicated by calculations of the orbit of Mars. The third law expresses that the farther a planet is from the Sun, the slower its orbital speed, and vice versa.
@gutenberg_org
The other weird law that he found was that planets sweep the same area for time. If you take the elliptical path over time and create a pie shaped wedge from the focal point, no matter how distant or how close, the area of the pie shape will be the same in the same amount of time. Weird but true.
Add comment