Gravitation Galileo was the first to recognise the fact that all bodies, irrespective of their masses, are accelerated towards the earth. Since the earliest of times, people were observing the heavenly bodies like sun, stars, planets, etc. and their movement. Ptolemy proposed the “Geocentric model” according to which all the heavenly bodies like the sun, stars, planets, moon, etc. revolve around the earth. Earth was considered to be stationary & taken as the centre of the universe. This theory was challenged by Copernicus. He suggested that description of motion of heavenly bodies would be simplified & more properly explained if we consider sun to be stationary & earth as well as other planets revolving around it (Heliocentric Model). This theory was also supported by Galileo. It was around the same time as Galileo, a nobleman called Tycho Brahe, spent his entire lifetime recording observations of the planets with the naked eye. His compiled data were analysed later by his assistant Johannes Kepler. He could extract from the data three elegant laws that now go by the name of Kepler's laws. These laws were known to Newton and enabled him to make a great scientific leap in proposing his universal law of gravitation. (Heliocentric model was already mentioned by Aryabhatta even before Copernicus. However, his ideas could not be communicated to the western philosophers). Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion 1. Lawof Orbits (Kepler's first law): All planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun situated at one of the foci of the ellipse ELLIPTICAL FOCUS oN win AXIS: The ellipticity of the orbits is very slight, hence the orbits may be taken as nearly circular. This law was a deviation from the Copernican model which allowed only circular orbits. The point closest to the sun (point P in the given figure) is known as Perihelion and the farthest point (point A in the given figure) is known as ‘Aphelion. The mid-point of the line PA, i.e, O, is the centre of the ellipse. Circle is a special case of ellipse, For a circle, two focii of the ellipse merge into one & semi-major axis becomes the radius of the circle. 2. Law of Areas (Kepler’s second law): The line joining a planet to the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time, i.e, the areal velocity of the planet around the sun is constant,This law comes from the observations that planets appear to move slower when they are farther from the ‘sun than when they are nearer. This law is based on the law of conservation of angular momentum. 3. Law of Periods (Kepler's third law): The square of the time period of revolution of a planet around the sun is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of the ellipse traced out by the planet. Mathematically, if we denote the time period of revolution of a planet around the sun by T & the semi- major axis of the elliptical orbit by a, then T? « a?