What year did Kepler publish his first two laws of planetary motion?

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Kepler published his first two laws of planetary motion in 1609.

They appeared in Astronomia nova, or New Astronomy, a book based mainly on Johannes Kepler's painstaking analysis of Tycho Brahe's exceptionally accurate observations of Mars. Kepler had expected planetary paths to be circles, as traditional astronomy and Copernican models commonly assumed, but circular calculations could not match Brahe's data closely enough.

Kepler's first law states that planets travel in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus. His second law states that a line from the Sun to a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times, meaning a planet moves faster when nearer the Sun and slower when farther away. Kepler reached the basic insight behind the second law before fully establishing the first.

The wording can cause a historical subtlety: in Astronomia nova, Kepler presented an earlier distance-based version as well as the area formulation of the second law, while the modern textbook presentation was clarified later. His third law came in 1619, in Harmonices Mundi, not in 1609.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Aug. 2026

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