EVERYDAY SCIENCE

Detailed explanation-1: -Kepler’s First Law: each planet’s orbit about the Sun is an ellipse. The Sun’s center is always located at one focus of the orbital ellipse. The Sun is at one focus. The planet follows the ellipse in its orbit, meaning that the planet to Sun distance is constantly changing as the planet goes around its orbit.

Detailed explanation-2: -Orbits are eliptical because of Newtons Law of Gravity (bodies attract each other in proportion to their mass and inversly proportional to the square of the distance between them). All worked out by Kepler some years ago. A circular orbit is a special (and very unlikely) case of an eliptical orbit.

Detailed explanation-3: -All planets in our solar system have an elliptical orbit such as the orbit of Mars seen here. An orbit is dependent on its eccentricity. Eccentricity means how much the orbit is squashed. A circular orbit has an eccentricity of 0, meaning it is not squashed at all.

Detailed explanation-4: -Comets go around the Sun in a highly elliptical orbit. They can spend hundreds and thousands of years out in the depths of the solar system before they return to Sun at their perihelion. Like all orbiting bodies, comets follow Kepler’s Laws-the closer they are to the Sun, the faster they move.

Detailed explanation-5: -Kepler’s 1st Law states that all planets orbit in an ellipse with the sun at one focus.