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Johannes Kepler discovered that the planets have elliptical orbits, and published the theory in 1618. It happened after he was given access to accurate measurements made by Tycho Brahe in Denmark.


It took over 1000 years to discover, because the planets' orbits are very like circles, and a system using circles made a good model of a planet's orbit until observations became accurate enough to reach the proper answer.

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12y ago

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