About

This interactive is used in Chapter 4. Explore Kepler’s Law and prove to yourself the relationship between the radius of a planet’s orbit and the length of time it takes to complete an orbit of its star. Try it with familiar planets orbiting the Sun, such as the Earth or Jupiter, or with the asteroid Ida. Or create a star with a different mass and see how that changes the results. Then, check out the orbits of new planets at different radii and with a variety of eccentricities in their orbits. This Interactive shows you the orbiting planets, their periods, and then displays a graph, to make it easy to spot how radius and period are linked.