Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion - Newton's Law of Gravitation

Newton's Law of Gravitation

By Newton's second law, the gravitational force that acts on the planet is:

where only depends on the property of the Sun. According to Newton's third Law, the Sun is also attracted by the planet with a force of the same magnitude. Now that the force is proportional to the mass of the planet, under the symmetric consideration, it should also be proportional to the mass of the Sun. So the form of the gravitational force should be

where is a universal constant. This is Newton's law of universal gravitation.

The acceleration of solar system body no i is, according to Newton's laws:

where is the mass of body no j, and is the distance between body i and body j, and is the unit vector from body i pointing towards body j, and the vector summation is over all bodies in the world, besides no i itself. In the special case where there are only two bodies in the world, Planet and Sun, the acceleration becomes

which is the acceleration of the Kepler motion.

Read more about this topic:  Kepler's Laws Of Planetary Motion

Famous quotes containing the words newton, law and/or gravitation:

    Where the statue stood
    Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
    The marble index of a mind for ever
    Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
    William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

    Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you ... take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.
    William Howard Taft (1857–1930)

    Knowledge, like matter, [my father] would affirm, was divisible in infinitum;Mthat the grains and scruples were as much a part of it, as the gravitation of the whole world.—In a word, he would say, error was error,—no matter where it fell,—whether in a fraction,—or a pound,—’twas alike fatal to truth.
    Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)