Kepler’s Laws of planetary orbits explain why the planets move at the speeds they do. You’ll be making a scale model of the solar system and tracking orbital speeds.
Kepler’s 1st Law states that planetary orbits about the Sun are not circles, but rather ellipses. The Sun lies at one of the foci of the ellipse. Kepler’s 2nd Law states that a line connecting the Sun and an orbiting planet will sweep out equal areas in for a given amount of time. Translation: the further away a planet is from the Sun, the slower it goes.
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