Johannes Kepler

Hello! My name is Johannes Kepler. I was born a long, long time ago, on December 27th, 1571, in a town in Germany. Even when I was a little boy, I loved looking up at the night sky. When I was six years old, my mother took me to a high hill to see a bright comet with a long, fiery tail. A few years later, my family and I watched the Moon turn red during an eclipse! These amazing sights made me want to learn all the secrets of the stars.

I wasn't the strongest kid, but I had a very curious mind. I loved math and puzzles, so when I grew up, I went to a big school called a university. There, a teacher told me about an idea from a man named Copernicus. He thought that the Earth and all the other planets moved around the Sun, not the other way around! I thought this was a brilliant idea and wanted to prove it was true.

To learn more, in the year 1600 I went to work with a famous star-gazer named Tycho Brahe. He had spent years mapping the exact locations of stars and planets. After he passed on, I got to study all his notes, especially about the planet Mars. For years, I tried to figure out the path Mars took through the sky. Everyone thought planets moved in perfect circles, but my math showed that wasn't quite right. It was a giant puzzle!

After a lot of hard work, I finally figured it out! Around the year 1609, I discovered that planets don’t travel in circles. They move in a shape like a stretched-out circle, called an ellipse. That was my first big rule! I also found out that planets move faster when they get closer to the Sun and slower when they are farther away. Later, in 1619, I discovered a third rule that used math to connect how long it takes a planet to go around the sun with how far away it is. These became my three special laws of how planets move.

I lived to be 58 years old, and I spent my whole life looking up at the sky and trying to understand the universe. My discoveries, especially my three laws, helped future scientists like Isaac Newton understand how everything in space works. Today, when scientists send rockets to the Moon or Mars, they still use my rules to figure out the perfect path to take. I'm so happy that my love for the stars helped everyone else understand them a little better, too.