Question

Explain the modification that Newton made to Kepler's third law.

Answer 1

There were two problems with this relation. First, Kepler did not know how it worked, he just knew it did. Second, the relation does not work for objects which are not orbiting the Sun, for example, the Moon orbiting the Earth. Isaac Newton solved both these problems with his Theory of Gravity, and discovered that the masses of the orbiting bodies also play a part. Newton developed a more general form of what was called Kepler's Third Law that could apply to any two objects orbiting a common center of mass. This is called Newton's Version of Kepler's Third Law:

M₁ + M₂ = A³ / P²

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