While Copernicus rightly observed that the planets revolve around the Sun, it was Kepler who correctly defined their orbits. At the age of 27, Kepler became the assistant of a wealthy astronomer, Tycho Brahe, who asked him to define the orbit of Mars. Brahe had collected a lifetime of astronomical observations, which, on his death, passed into Kepler’s hands. (Brahe, who had his own Earth-centered model of the Universe, withheld the bulk of his observations from Kepler at least in part because he did not want Kepler to use them to prove Copernican theory correct.) Using these observations, Kepler found that the orbits of the planets followed three laws.
