Concepts of the Solar System

Our solar system consists of our star, the

Sun, and everything bound to it by gravity

The planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,

and Neptune; dwarf planets such as Pluto; dozens of moons; and
millions of asteroids, comets, and meteoroids.
If you observe the daily motion of the Sun and Moon and the
nightly motion of the Moon and stars over a period of time,
you can easily convince yourself that all the heavenly bodies
revolve around a fixed, motionless Earth.
Over time, the planets appear
to move across the
background of stars,
sometimes slowing, then
reversing their direction in a
loop before resuming their
normal motion. This
retrograde, or reverse, motion
for the planet Mars
is shown in the Figure.
The apparent position of Mars against the
background of stars as it goes through retrograde
motion. Each position is observed approximately two
weeks after the previous position.

To explain the occasional retrograde motion of the planets

with this model, later Greek astronomers had to modify it
by assuming a secondary motion of the planets.
THE GEOCENTRIC MODEL
Early Greek astronomers and philosophers had
attempted to explain the observed motions of the
Sun, Moon, and stars with a geometric model, a
model of perfect geometrical spheres with
attached celestial bodies orbiting around a fixed
Earth in perfect circles.
Aristotle looks at the sky and notices that all
objects rise and set. He concludes that the
Earth must be the center of the universe and
thus the center of these observed
astronomical bodies. This becomes known
as the geocentric model.
The combined motion of the
movement of the planet
around the epicycle as the
sphere turned resulted in a
loop with retrograde
motion.
Thus, the earlier model of the
solar system, modified with
epicycles, was able to explain
all that was known about the
movement of the stars and
planets at that time.
A version of this explanation of
retrograde motion ― perfectly
circular epicycle motion on
perfectly spherical turning
spheres ―was published by
Ptolemy in the second century
A.D. and this geocentric model
came to be known as the
Ptolemaic system.
THE HELIOCENTRIC MODEL
The idea that Earth
revolves around the Sun
rather than the Sun
moving around Earth
was proposed by a
Polish astronomer,
Nicolas Copernicus, in a
book published in 1543.
In Copernicus’ model, each planet moved around the Sun in
perfect circles at different distances, moving at faster
speeds in orbits closer to the Sun, when viewed from a
moving Earth, the other planets would appear to undergo
retrograde motion because of the combined motions of
Earth and the planets.
The Copernican system of a
heliocentric, or Sun-centered, solar
system provided a simpler
explanation for retrograde motion
than the Ptolemaic system, but it
was only an alternative way to
consider the solar system. The
Copernican system offered no
compelling reasons why the
alternative Ptolemaic system
should be rejected.
Tycho Brahe was a Danish nobleman who constructed highly
accurate observatories for his time, which was before the
telescope.
Brahe spent about twenty years (1576-1597) making systematic,
uninterrupted measurements of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars.
His skilled observations resulted in the first precise, continuous
record of planetary position. In 1600, Brahe hired a young German,
Johannes Kepler, as an assistant.
When Brahe died in 1601, Kepler was promoted to Brahe’s position
and was given access to the vast collection of observation
records. Kepler spent the next 25 years analyzing the data to find
out if planets follow circular paths or if they followed the paths of
epicycles.
Today, his findings are called Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.
Kepler’s first law states that each planet moves in an orbit that
has the shape of an ellipse, with the Sun located at one focus
(Figure).
Kepler’s second law states that an imaginary line between the Sun
and a planet moves over equal areas of the ellipse during equal
time intervals (Figure)
Kepler’s third law states
that the square of the
orbital periods of th planets
is directly proportional to
the cube of that planets
semi-major axis, or 𝑡 2 ∝
𝑑3. Thus, as the orbit’s
radius increases, so does
the period for a planet to
Direct relationship between the orbital
orbit the sun.
period and the semi major axis.