Related papers: Deriving Kepler's Laws Using Quaternions
Although the differential calculus was invented by Newton, Kepler established his famous laws 70 years earlier by using the same idea, namely to find a path in a nonuniform field of force by small steps. It is generally not known that…
Kepler's laws of planetary motion are acknowledged as highly significant to the construction of universal gravitation. The present study demonstrates different ways to derive the law of equal areas for the Earth by general geometrical and…
We explain the solution of the following two problems: obtaining of Kepler's laws from Newton's laws (so called two bodies problem) and obtaining the fourth Newton's law (the formula for gravitation) as a corollary of Kepler's laws. This…
More than 150 years after their invention by Hamilton, quaternions are now widely used in the aerospace and computer animation industries to track the paths of moving objects undergoing three-axis rotations. It is shown here that they…
Proceeding like Newton with a discrete time approach of motion and a geometrical representation of velocity and acceleration, we obtain Kepler's laws without solving differential equations. The difficult part of Newton's work, when it calls…
The Kepler map was derived by Petrosky (1986) and Chirikov and Vecheslavov (1986) as a tool for description of the long-term chaotic orbital behaviour of the comets in nearly parabolic motion. It is a two-dimensional area-preserving map,…
Kepler's laws of planetary motion are deduced from those of a harmonic oscillator following Arnold. Conversely, the circular orbits through the Earth's center suggested by Galilei are consistent with an $r^{-5}$ potential as found before by…
The motion of binary star systems is re-examined in the presence of perturbations from the theory of general relativity. The Kepler problem is regularized and linearized with quaternions. In this way first order perturbation results are…
In most text books of mechanics, Newton's laws or Hamilton's equations of motion are first written down and then solved based on initial conditions to determine the constants of the motions and to describe the trajectories of the particles.…
The law of centripetal force governing the motion of celestial bodies in eccentric conic sections, has been established and thoroughly investigated by Sir Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica. Yet its profound implications on the…
The Earth itself is not stationary but keeps revolving, and its motion further satisfies the law of equal area according to the heliocentric doctrine. That satisfaction can be used to construct the mathematical relationships between the…
Quaternions, discovered by Sir William Rowan Hamilton in the 19th century, are a significant extension of complex numbers and a profound tool for understanding three-dimensional rotations. This work explores the quaternion's history,…
We examine the equant model for the motion of planets, which has been the starting point of Kepler's investigations before he modified it because of Mars observations. We show that, up to first order in eccentricity, this model implies for…
Inspired by the relation between the algebra of complex numbers and plane geometry, William Rowan Hamilton sought an algebra of triples for application to three dimensional geometry. Unable to multiply and divide triples, he invented a…
Kepler's orbits with corrections due to Special Relativity are explored using the Lagrangian formalism. A very simple model includes only relativistic kinetic energy by defining a Lagrangian that is consistent with both the relativistic…
An elementary proof of Kepler's first law, i.e. that bounded planetary orbits are elliptical, is derived without the use of calculus. The proof is similar in spirit to previous derivations, in that conservation laws are used to obtain an…
Orbital motion of a body can be found from Newtonian equation of motion. However, it is useful to express the motion through time derivatives of Keplerian orbital elements, mainly if the motion is perturbed by small perturbing force. The…
We derive Copernicus's epicycles from Newton's gravitational force law by assuming that a planet's orbit is a perturbed circular orbit, with the perturbation defined to be co-rotating with the said orbit. We substitute this orbit expression…
After some more than four centuries from the formulation and publication (in Astronomia Nova) of the Kepler's Equation, which relates the eccentric (and, intermediately, the true) anomaly of the planetary trajectories to the uniformly…
In this article, we review the main results of Volume I of Newton's Principia which relates Kepler's law of planets and universal gravitation. In order to clarify the reasoning of Newton, elementary and simple proofs are given to inspire…