NATS 1525 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Curve
23 Jan 2019
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Document Summary
We discussed how eventually kepler discovered that the orbits of the planets were not circles as dictated by aristotle (and for that matter copernicus) but ellipses. You might have asked yourself, why did this discovery take such a long time. In order to understand this, you need to get acquainted with some basic properties of ellipses. A circle is a closed curve, where the distance between any point on the curve and the centre is equal to a constant which we call radius. An ellipse is a closed curve where for every point on this curve, you have p f1 + p. Points f1 and f2 are called the foci (plural for focus) of the ellipse and are special points (a circle is a special ellipse where the two foci are both located on the centre). The eccentricity of the ellipse represents how elongated an ellipse is. Eccentricity, e, is a number between 0 and 1 (0 e < 1).
