Why Do the Planets Orbit the Sun in an Elliptical Fashion?
At one point, it was believed that the planets orbit the sun in a perfect circle. At first glance this seems logical,and in fact some objects do orbit circularly. With the sun’s gravitational pull on the planets being constant, why wouldn’t the resulting orbit be circular? With the development of physics, and discoveries by scientists like Kepler and Newton, we learned that planets orbit in an elliptical manner — in the shape of an elongated, or squished, circle. The size and shape of elliptic orbits, also known as eccentric orbits, vary among orbital paths. The eccentricity of the way the planets orbit is determined by the shape of the path’s ellipse. For example, the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbital path is a near perfect circle, whereas the eccentricity of Pluto is a longer and thinner ellipse. The best explanation for why planets orbit elliptically is by way of Kepler’s Laws of Planetary motion. These three laws, discovered by German astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1605, provide a
