Why did Kepler's work form the foundation of the modern model of the solar system?

Answer 1

Galileo Galilei introduced a new scientific idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Before this, Aristotle, a Greek philosopher have said that the earth was at the center and the sun revolves around it. When the physicist Galileo presented his idea, the people in the Church was against it as Aristotle's ideas was already stated in the Divine Book (The Bible) during that time.

Answer 2

Kepler was the first person in history to correctly describe the motion of the planets around the Sun. He did this between 1609 and 1619, the same time that Galileo was doing the first observations with the newly discovered telescope and not quite a century after Copernicus had arrived at the idea that the Earth went around the Sun.

Kepler's laws were mathematically correct, but he did not know why. It waited another half century until Newton and his law of gravity in 1686 for the mathematics to be shown to be a consequence of the fundamental laws of physics.

It is fair to say that Kepler's laws are the foundation of our modern understanding of planetary motion and the motion of the moon, comets and asteroids and even satellites. Any time we want to calculate the time and place that one of these will be in the sky, we start with Kepler's laws.

The laws needed improvement, of course. Kepler was correct about what a single body would do as it orbited around another, but the universe is not made up of individual objects acting on their own. It took a while to notice, but the planets exit forces on one another in addition to the force of the Sun. Gravitational forces act between all bodies in the universe all the time, so when you want tog et things really accurate, you need to add in these other forces.

Alas, by 1916, we were to learn that we could do even better with the theory of relativity, both the special and general theories are needed.

So, Copernicus started the process by proclaiming the heliocentric theory and Kepler gave us the basic laws of planetary motion in correct mathematical form and Newton told us that these were the natural consequence of gravity and then Einstein topped it off with the explanation of gravity as the curvature of space and time. All this in just 400 years.

Answer 3

Galileo's discoveries with the telescope showed up serious flaws in the ancient Ptolemaic theory of the planets' movements among the fixed stars.

Galileo felt that his discoveries proved the correctness of Copernicus's theory, published in 1543. However he was wrong in this because eventually Johannes Kepler's theory published in 1609 was the one that became accepted.

But both Copernicus and Kepler had the Sun at the centre in their theories, so in principle Galileo was right on that point even though there was no direct proof of it in his lifetime.

Answer 4

Kepler's laws of planetary motion (for the most part) successfully explained the motions of the planets around the sun.

Answer 5

Every one knows whats there in a solar system. But, what one dosen't know is that how is it build.

Answer 6

they all had a theory of how the solar system worked and what did it look like.

Answer 7

Yes he did