Chapter 2:Copernican Revolution SUMMARY Many ancient cultures constructed elaborate structures that served as calendars and astronomical

observatories. The study of the universe on the very largest scales is called cosmology. Unlike the Sun and the Moon, planets sometimes appear to temporarily reverse their direction of motion (from night to night) relative to the stars and then resume their normal "forward" course. This phenomenon is called retrograde motion.
Geocentric models of the universe were based on the assumption that the Sun, the

Moon, and the planets all orbit Earth. The most successful and long-lived of these was the Ptolemaic model. To account for retrograde motion within the geocentric picture, it was necessary to suppose that planets moved on small circles called epicycles, whose centers orbited Earth on larger circles called deferents. The heliocentric view of the solar system holds that Earth, like all the planets, orbits the Sun. This model accounts for retrograde motion and the observed size and brightness variations of the planets in a much more natural way than the geocentric model. The widespread realization during the Renaissance that the solar system is Sun centered, and not Earth centered, is known as the Copernican revolution, in honor of Nicholas Copernicus, who laid the foundations of the modern heliocentric model. Johannes Kepler improved on Copernicus's model with his three laws of planetary motion: (1) Planetary orbits are ellipses, with the Sun at onefocus. (2) A planet moves faster as its orbit takes it closer to the Sun. (3) The semi-major axis of the orbit is related in a simple way to the planet's orbit period. Most planets move on orbits whose eccentricities are quite small, so their paths differ only slightly from perfect circles. Galileo Galilei is often regarded as the father of experimental science. His telescopic observations of the Moon, the Sun, Venus, and Jupiter played a crucial role in supporting and strengthening the Copernican picture of the solar system. The distance from Earth to the Sun is called the astronomical unit. Nowadays, the astronomical unit is determined by bouncing radar signals off the planet Venus and measuring the time taken for the signal to return. Isaac Newton succeeded in explaining Kepler's laws in terms of a few general physical principles, now known as Newtonian mechanics. The tendency of a body to keep moving at constant velocity is called inertia. The greater the body's mass, the

greater its inertia. To change the velocity, aforce must be applied. The rate of change of velocity, called acceleration, is equal to the applied force divided by the body's mass. To explain planetary orbits, Newton postulated that gravity attracts the planets to the Sun. Every object with any mass is surrounded by a gravitational field, whose strength decreases with distance according to an inverse-square law. This field determines the gravitational force exerted by the object on any other body in the universe. Newton's laws imply that a planet does not orbit the precise center of the Sun but instead that both the planet and the Sun orbit the common center of mass of the two