BRAHE ON KEPLER’S LAW OF

PLANETARY MOTION

HUMSS 201
 TYCHO BRAHE

• Tycho Brahe is a Danish astronomer and is known for

his accurate and comprehensive observations in
astrology.
• He is best known for the development of astronomical
instruments as well as the measurement and fixing of
the position of the stars that paved the way for the
future discoveries
• His data were the most accurate possible before the
invention of the telescope
 JOHANNES KEPLER

• Johannes Kepler is a German astronomer and

astrologer. Kepler was best known for his
“three laws of planetary motion “
• He is a student of Tycho Brahe
• Kepler was able to formulate his laws of
planetary motion with the help of Brahe’s
collective data.
 BRAHE’S MODEL OF COSMOS

• Brahe presented a new model of

cosmos. In his model, all of the planets
orbited the sun and the moon and the
sun orbited the Earth

• “This system offered much of the

elegance of the Copernican system,
without the problems related to
stellar parallax and a moving Earth”
https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cosmos-with-carl-
sagan/articles-and-essays/modeling-the-cosmos/whose-revolution-copernicus-
brahe-and-kepler
KEPLER’S LAWS OF PLANETARY MOTION

• The Law of Ellipses

• The Law of Equal Areas
• The Law of Harmonies
 THE LAW OF ELLIPSES

• The path of the planets about the sun is

elliptical in shape, with the center of the sun
being located at one focus
 THE LAW OF EQUAL AREAS

• An imaginary line drawn from the center of the sun to the center of
the planet will sweep out equal areas in equal intervals of time.
 THE LAW OF
HARMONIES

• The ratio of the squares of

the periods of any two
planets is equal to the ratio
of the cubes of their
average distances from the
sun. (The Law of
Harmonies)
 • Tycho Brahe’s decades-long, meticulous
observations of the stars and planets provided
Kepler with what today we’d call a robust,
BRAHE well-controlled dataset to test his hypotheses
CONTRIBUTION
concerning planetary motion (this way of
ON KEPLER’S
describing it is, dear reader, a deliberate
L AW S O F
P L A N E TA RY anachronism). In particular,Tycho’s
M OT I O N observations of the position of Mars in the
Uraniborg night sky were the primary source
of hard data Kepler used to derive, and test,
his three laws.