Wolfram Demonstrations Project

Kepler's third law states that the square of the period of revolution

of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semimajor axis

of the planet's elliptical orbit around the Sun. In symbols,

. The constant

can be taken as 1 for simplicity, equivalent to measuring

in years and

in astronomical units. In this Demonstration the ellipses have different eccentricities; the value of

is chosen to equal 5, so that the period is equal to

The actual value of

, where

is the gravitational constant and

is the mass of the Sun.

Contributed by: Enrique Zeleny

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Kepler's Third Law