sign up I login
 advanced
refer a friend - earn nickels!!

Ask & Discuss Questions with Community & Experts

Moderation Team
Ask iit jee aieee pet cbse icse state board community Discussion Response Post to: what can be the derivation of the 2nd and the 3rd keplers law of planetary motion
Forum Index -> Mechanics -> View Full Question like the article? email it to a friend.  
Author Message
ashish_banga (975)

Blazing goIITian

Olaaa!! Perrrfect answer. 153  bad job dude!! I dont approve of this answer! 1  [260 rates]

ashish_banga's Avatar

total posts: 1333    
offline Offline

Kepler's Third Law of Planetary Motion:


The square of the period of revolution around the sun is equal to the cube of the orbit’s semimajor axis.


 


          According to the first law, a planet’s orbit is elliptical in shape.  The length of the semimajor axis of the ellipse would be half the distance between the farthest points.  Using the equation for the ellipse derived in the first law, the two extremes of the curve are where  and , which occur when q  =0 and q  =p, respectively.  The length of the semimajor axis would therefore be


.


Integrating the area of the ellipse over a full period of revolution using the equation derived in the second law gives


.


For an ellipse, , where a and b are the semimajor axis and the semiminor axis, respectively.  By the definition of the eccentricity of an ellipse, b can be related to a and by


.


Plugging this into the area equation results in


,


which can be re-written as


.


Since k was originally defined as , this can be further reduced to the specific force of gravity by saying , where G is the Universal Gravitational Constant and M and m are defined as they were in the assumption starting the first law.  Replacing k with this expression gives


,


or, after squaring both sides,


,


which is often considered to be Newton’s correction of Kepler’s Third Law since it applies to the general case of any small body orbiting a large one, not just within our solar system.  It should be noted that in the case of the two bodies being of comparable mass, the reduced mass, , of the system should have been used before inserting the expression for k.  This would have given


.


After replacing k, the result would be


,


and squaring the expression would give


,


Which reduces down to the original form when M >> m, which is a good approximation when comparing stars and planets.  For the case of the Solar System, dividing the expression by itself with the values for Earth yields


.


If T is in units of years and a is in units of Astronomical Units, then  and , which reduces the above equation to



under these special conditions.  This is Kepler’s Third Law of Planetary Motion.  Although it is not the most general form, it is the simplest to use when dealing with the Solar System, which is what Kepler’s Laws were meant to describe.


 


source : http://astro.berkeley.edu/~converse/Lagrange/Kepler'sThirdLaw.htm


 

 this reply: 14 points  (with Olaaa!! Perrrfect answer.   in 4 votes )   [?]
 
You have to be logged on to rate
  
 

Top Offers for goIITians
Correspondence Courses
Brilliant Tutorials
Narayana Institute
Aakash Institute
Classroom/Crash Courses
Narayana - Kota , Delhi , Others
Brilliant Tutorials - Class , Crash
Aakash Institute - Medical , Engg
Online Test Series
Brilliant Tutorials
Narayana Institute
Aakash Institute
Mahesh Tutorials
AMITY      Sri Chaitanya