September 11, 2018 K: Kepler

First we’ll look at Johannes Kepler, most of his work done in the early sixteen hundreds, and then we’ll look at the men who influenced him. Kepler was born into a world where astronomy and astrology hadn’t yet divided into science and the paranormal, respectively.

Look up in the night sky during the full moon through binoculars or telescope, and you’ll see the Tycho Crater, where an asteroid crashed into the moon about 108 million years ago (as confirmed by the Apollo 16 mission). if you follow the debris ejected from the crater site, you’ll see that the debris streams make straight lines all the way to the rim of the moon’s face. Tycho crater is named after astronomer Tycho Brahe who collected the position of stars that later formed a whole compilation of data for Kepler, the astronomer who figured out how all those stars moved, well, most of them.

Lines Of Debris radiate from Light Circular Crater, Tycho (LL)

What did Johannes Kepler discover?

Kepler’s Three Laws of Planetary Motion:

1. Law of Orbits: An object (ex:planet) orbits another celestial object (ex:sun) with in an elliptical orbit with the center of gravity of the much larger object (ex:sun) at one of the foci of the ellipse (see link above for illustration).
2. Law of Areas: A radial line (radius) of an orbit sweeps out equal areas in equal times (see link above for illustration).
3. Law of Periods: If you cube half the major axis of the ellipse, you get the square of the number of years the orbit takes (for Earth, since right now the eccentricity of its orbit is approximately zero, that means major axis = minor axis = 1. Half the axis is 1 astronomical unit (about 90 million miles). So 1 cubed is 1 x 1 x 1 = 1. The square root of 1 gives us the number of years it takes Earth to orbit the sun (1 year)) 
4. Eccentricity: Eccentricity is measured from 0 (a perfect circle) to 1 (an ellipse). Today the orbit of Earth is nearly a perfect circle, but its orbit does become elliptical every 100,000 years, and at that time, when its northern axis is pointed away from the sun in the winter, ice ages occur. At that time the semi-major axis is larger than it is today and since Kepler related it to the length of the year, we see that the farther Earth is from the sun in the winter the longer the winter orbit lasts and so the cold climate). [see above link] 

When Galileo drew the four moons he saw orbiting Jupiter through his new telescope, Kepler found that his 3 laws, above, were approximately right. His laws formed the basis of Newton’s Law of Gravitational Attraction, derived about a century later.

Black Matter and Energy Mystery: Kepler’s Equations  and Newton’s equation have problems. Here are the problems: 

1. Kepler’s Equations only apply to the solar system with one planet. The other existing planets interfere somewhat with his calculations.
2. Newton’s Gravitational Equation only applies in normal space-time and not in relativistic space-time (Einstein’s General and Special Relativity).
3. Even using the Lorentz Transformation to get relativistic values something is wrong in our calculations of stars orbiting the edges of galaxies. they’re moving faster than either Kepler, or Newton, or Einstein predicts. 

         a. Maybe some matter is so cool that it can’t be detected.

         b. Maybe we don’t understand how Special Relativity works.

         c. Maybe we don’t understand how universal expansion works.

The expanding droplet experiment covered on this site is analogous to Newton’s Gravitational Equation through surface tension in its boundary (as opposed to gravitational tension, possibly a result of universal expansion between expanding crests and inertial troughs of sine wave perturbations in gravitational fields. If Gravitation and resulting speed of orbit of stars at the lip of galaxies is affected by a relationship across a constant velocity boundary it may be affected by curvature as is surface tension.

With a fluid boundary, we get an idea of how curvature due to uneven expansion can amplify gravitational tension and therefore speed. With any boundary, we find that the curvature amplifies the surface tension, so perhaps curvature of space-time at the edge of galaxies does the same thing to gravitation and the speed it creates.

NASA has two Kepler-named detectors launched that have already begun to tell us lots about how many Earth-sized planets are out there orbiting stars. Soon we might be able to detect the atmosphere of these Earthlike planets (with Kepler II).

 

Jupiter Galilean Moons