In 1600 AD, Johannes Kepler sought employment with Tycho Brahe, who had some of the most

precise astronomical data available. Using Brahe's precise observations of the planet Mars, Kepler
spent the next five years developing his own method for characterizing planetary motion. In 1609,
Johannes Kepler published his three laws of planetary motion, explaining how the planets orbit the
Sun. In Kepler's final planetary model, he described planetary orbits as following elliptical paths with
the Sun at a focal point of the ellipse. Kepler discovered that the square of the orbital period of each
planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit, or equivalently, that
the ratio of these two values is constant for all planets in the Solar System.[note 4]
On 25 August 1609, Galileo Galilei demonstrated his first telescope to a group of Venetian
merchants, and in early January 1610, Galileo observed four dim objects near Jupiter, which he
mistook for stars. However, after a few days of observation, Galileo realized that these "stars" were
in fact orbiting Jupiter. These four objects (later named the Galilean moons in honor of their
discoverer) were the first celestial bodies observed to orbit something other than the Earth or Sun.
Galileo continued to observe these moons over the next eighteen months, and by the middle of 1611
he had obtained remarkably accurate estimates for their periods.

Galilean free fall[edit]