On Monday, January 10, at the Jan Kepler Grammar School in Prague a seminar was held on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of Jan Kepler’s birth and the 50th anniversary of the grammar school’s naming after Jan Kepler (1971).
M. Šlechta from the Stellar Department of the Astronomical institute, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic discussed in his lecture the (seemingly unrelated) connection of Johann Kepler with modern exoplanet research. However, it is from Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and Galileo’s physical research that Newton’s law of gravity emerges, which is used to study the motion of celestial bodies, both binary stars, multiple stars systems, and exoplanets.
The presentation also included a brief introduction to the working group for exoplanet research, of the Stellar department, and the methods it uses for research (eg spectroscopic measurements of radial velocities).
More information available in Czech
