Kepler's Third Law

A planet (point mass) is orbiting a star with a mean anomaly of 10 astronomical units. The period of the orbit is 2 earth years. If the mass of the star is 4 times the mass of the planet, the mass of the planet in kilograms can be described as approximately 3*10^x . Find x .

24 20 -20 Other

This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and, finally, (c) loading the non-javascript version of this page . We're sorry about the hassle.

2 solutions

Joem Camacho
Mar 7, 2014

using harmonic law, P 2 = 4 π 2 G ( M 1 + m 2 ) R 3 { P }^{ 2 }=\frac { 4{ \pi }^{ 2 } }{ G({ M }_{ 1 }+{ m }_{ 2 }) } { R }^{ 3 } , if the mass of the star is 4 times the mass of the planet, then P 2 = 4 π 2 G ( 4 m 1 + m 1 ) R 3 { P }^{ 2 }=\frac { 4{ \pi }^{ 2 } }{ G({ 4m }_{ 1 }+{ m }_{ 1 }) } { R }^{ 3 } . substitute all the given values, we arrived at

3.13 × 10 x = 4 π 2 ( 10 3 ) ( 6.67 × 10 ) 11 ( 5 ) ( 2 ) 2 3.13\times { 10 }^{ x }\quad =\quad \frac { { 4\pi }^{ 2 }\left( { 10 }^{ 3 } \right) }{ { \left( 6.67\times 10 \right) }^{ -11 }\left( 5 \right) ({ 2 })^{ 2 } }

to get the value of x, apply the logarithms on both sides, and we get:

x = log 2.959 × 10 13 3 = 12.99 13 x\quad =\quad \log { \frac { { 2.959\times 10 }^{ 13 } }{ 3 } } =\quad 12.99\approx 13

Or yeah that's good, too. I think some classes will show you how to derive it with Newton's law. Worth a glance

Spock Weakhypercharge - 7 years, 1 month ago

13, because Tau squared is equal to 4 pi^2 a^3 all divided by G(Star mass + Planet mass) according to Kepler's third law.

0 pending reports

×

Problem Loading...

Note Loading...

Set Loading...