Q.If the distance between the Earth and Sun were to be doubled from its present value, the number of days in a year would be

Kepler's Third Law: The Harmony of the Planets

Imagine you're watching two planets orbiting the Sun. One is close in — Mercury, zipping around in just 88 days. Another is far out — Saturn, taking nearly 30 years to complete one lap. You'd expect the farther planet to take longer, but here's the surprising part: the relationship isn't just "farther = slower." It's much more precise, and it reveals a deep truth about gravity itself.

The Intuition

Think of a planet as a runner on a circular track. The farther out the track, the longer the lap — that's obvious. But Kepler noticed something subtler: if you double the distance from the Sun, the orbital period doesn't just double. It increases by a factor of about $2.8$ (which is $\sqrt{8}$). Triple the distance, and the period grows by about $5.2$ (which is $\sqrt{27}$).

There's a pattern here. The period seems to grow as the 3/2 power of the distance. Why? Because gravity weakens with distance, so a farther planet feels a weaker pull and moves more slowly — not just because the track is longer, but because it's moving slower along that track.

The Precise Statement

For planets orbiting the Sun, if you measure $T$ in Earth years and $a$ in astronomical units (AU, where 1 AU = Earth's average distance from the Sun), the constant of proportionality is exactly 1:

So for Earth: $T = 1$ year, $a = 1$ AU, and $1^2 = 1^3$ — it checks out.

For Mars: $a \approx 1.52$ AU, so $T^2 = (1.52)^3 \approx 3.51$, giving $T \approx 1.87$ years. That's about 687 days — exactly right.

Why It Works (The Physics)

Newton later showed that Kepler's Third Law is a direct consequence of his law of gravitation. For a circular orbit (a good approximation for most planets), the centripetal force needed to keep the planet in orbit is provided by gravity:

Here $M$ is the Sun's mass, $m$ the planet's mass, $r$ the orbital radius, and $v$ the orbital speed. The speed is related to the period by $v = 2\pi r / T$. Substituting and simplifying:

Rearranging:

The quantity $4\pi^2/(GM)$ is a constant for all planets orbiting the Sun. So $T^2 \propto r^3$ — exactly Kepler's law.

A Common Mistake …