Kepler's Laws, Newton's Laws, and the Search for New Planets

Introduction. One of the high points of elementary calculus is the derivation of Kepler’s empirically deduced laws of planetary motion from Newton’s Law of Gravity and his second law of motion. However, the standard treatment of the subject in calculus books is flawed for at least three reasons that I think are important. First, Newton’s Laws are used to derive a differential equation for the displacement vector from the Sun to a planet; say the Earth. Then it is shown that the displacement vector lies in a plane, and if the base point is translated to the origin, the endpoint traces out an ellipse. This is said to confirm Kepler’s first law, that the planets orbit the sun in an elliptical path, with the sun at one focus. However, the alert student may notice that the identical argument for the displacement vector in the opposite direction would show that the Sun orbits the Earth in an ellipse, which, it turns out, is very close to a circle with the Earth at the center. That would seem to provide aid and comfort to the Church’s rejection of Galileo’s claim that his heliocentric view had more validity than their geocentric one. Second, by placing the sun at the origin, the impression is given that either the sun is fixed, or else, that one may choose coordinates attached to a moving body, inertial or not. However, Newton’s equations in their usual form hold precisely in inertial coordinates. Furthermore, it is an immediate consequence of Newton’s Laws that the center of gravity of the two bodies can serve as the origin of an inertial coordinate system. One then finds that both the Earth and the Sun describe elliptical paths with a focus at the center of gravity of the pair. Third, by considering only the displacement vector, the treatment misses an opportunity to present one of the greatest recent triumphs of Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s Laws: the discovery of extrasolar planets during the past decade, none of which has been observed directly, but whose existence and orbital parameters have been deduced by detecting and analyzing the motion of the stars that they orbit. Two other considerations make the correct way of treating the subject particularly desirable. First, the current treatment for the displacement vector could be left as is, and only a little algebra is needed to show that the same vector referred to the center of gravity is a constant scalar multiple of the one referred to the sun. Second, it connects with an exciting area of current research in astronomy where the methods of elementary calculus have direct application. The purpose of this note is to spell out the slight modifications to the standard treatment of Kepler’s Laws that are needed to obtain the additional and accurate information, and to provide a user’s guide to the website http://exoplanets.org where a list of all the extrasolar planets discovered so far is maintained and constantly updated.