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Astronomycast Episode 189 from Monday, May 10, 2010. Johannes Kepler and his laws.

Welcome to Astronomycast, our weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Cain, I'm the publisher of university and with me is Dr. Pamela Gaia Professor at Southern Illinois University.

Hi Pamela, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, just a little bit too hot here.

Right, well you need to turn off all your fans to keep your place nice and quiet, so we don't bother the listeners.

Just another sacrifice that we make.

I am sitting in a sauna for the sake of better audio.

Perfect.

I'm sure they're very grateful.

So Nicholas Copernicus changed our understanding of the universe when he rearranged the solar system to put the sun at the center, with the earth becoming just another of the planet's orbiting.

But the movement of the planets didn't really match the theory, not until Johannes Kepler came along with his ellipses and everything finally worked out.

So we're going to do another of our two partners.

This week we're going to talk about Johannes Kepler and the three immutable laws of planetary motion.

And then next week we will talk about the mission Kepler, which is about one of the coolest missions that is up in space right now.

It could very well discover Earth-sized worlds orbiting other stars.

It's guaranteed to.

Well, we hope. We hope. Nothing's guaranteed.

We hope. So that's, so that'll be next week.

So this week we're going to talk about the man and next week we'll talk about the mission named after the man since people have been enjoying that.

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