• Fill in your birthdate below in the space indicated.

(Note you
must enter the year as a 4-digit number!)
• Click on the "Calculate" button.
• Notice that your age on other worlds will automatically fill in.
Notice that Your age is different on the different worlds. Notice
that your age in "days" varies wildly.
• Notice when your next birthday on each world will be. The date
given is an "earth date".
• You can click on the images of the planets to get more
information about them from Bill Arnett's incredible Nine
Planetsweb site.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/age/index.html

The Days (And Years) Of Our Lives

Looking at the numbers above, you'll immediately notice that

you are different ages on the different planets. This brings up
the question of how we define the time intervals we measure.
What is a day? What is a year?

The earth is in motion. Actually, several different motions all at

once. There are two that specifically interest us. First, the
earth rotates on it's axis, like a spinning top. Second, the
earth revolves around the sun, like a tetherball at the end of
a string going around the center pole.

The top-like rotation of the earth on its axis is how we define

the day. The time it takes the earth to rotate from noon until
the next noon we define as one day. We further divide this
period of time into 24 hours, each of which is divided into 60
minutes, each of which is broken into 60 seconds. There are
no rules that govern the rotation rates of the planets, it all
depends on how much "spin" was in the original material that
went into forming each one. Giant Jupiter has lots of spin,
turning once on its axis every 10 hours, while Venus takes 243
days to spin once.

The revolution of the earth around the sun is how we define

the year. A year is the time it takes the earth to make one
revolution - a little over 365 days.

We all learn in grade school that the planets move at differing

rates around the sun. While earth takes 365 days to make one
circuit, the closest planet, Mercury, takes only 88 days. Poor,
ponderous, and distant Pluto takes a whopping 248 years for
one revolution. Below is a table with the rotation rates and
revolution rates of all the planets.

Rotatio
Revolution
Planet n
Period
Period
58.6 87.97
Mercury
days days
243 224.7
Venus
days days
0.99 365.26
Earth
days days
1.03
Mars 1.88 years
days
0.41 11.86
Jupiter
days years
0.45 29.46
Saturn
days years
0.72 84.01
Uranus
days years
0.67 164.79
Neptune
days years
6.39 248.59
Pluto
days years

Why the huge differences in periods? We need to go back to

the time of Galileo, except that we're not going to look at his
work, but rather at the work of one of his contemporaries,
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630).

Kepler briefly worked with the great Danish observational

astronomer, Tycho Brahe. Tycho was a great and extremely
accurate observer, but he did't have the mathematical capacity
to analyze all of the data he collected. After Tycho's death in
1601, Kepler was able to obtain Tycho's observations. Tycho's
observations of planetary motion were the most accurate of
the time (before the invention of the telescope!). Using these
observations, Kepler discovered that the planets do not move
in circles, as 2000 years of "Natural Philosophy" had taught.
He discovered that they move in ellipses. A ellipse is a sort of
squashed circle with a short diameter (the "minor axis") and a
longer diameter (the "major axis"). He found that the Sun was
positioned at one "focus" of the ellipse (there are two "foci",
both located on the major axis). He also found that when the
planets were nearer the sun in their orbits, they move faster
than when they were farther from the sun. Many years later,
he discovered that the farther a planet was from the sun, on
the average, the longer it took for that planet to make one
complete revolution. These three laws, stated mathematically
by Kepler, are known as "Kepler's Laws of Orbital Motion."
Kepler's Laws are still used today to predict the motions of
planets, comets, asteroids, stars, galaxies, and spacecraft.

Here you see a planet in a very elliptical orbit.

Note how it speeds up when it's near the Sun.
(Requires QuickTime Plugin)

Kepler's third law is the one that interests us the most. It

states precisely that the period of time a planet takes to go
around the sun squared is proportional to the average distance
from the sun cubed. Here's the formula:

Let's just solve for the period by taking the square root of both
sides:
Note that as the distance of the planet from the sun is
increased, the period, or time to make one orbit, will get
longer. Kepler didn't know the reason for these laws, though he
knew it had something to do with the Sun and its influence on
the planets. That had to wait 50 years for Isaac Newton to
discover the universal law of gravitation.

The Gravity Of The Situation

Closer planets revolve faster, more distant planets revolve

slower. Why? The answer lies in how gravity works. The force
of gravity is a measure of the pull between two bodies. This
force depends on a few things. First, it depends on the mass of
the sun and on the mass of the planet you are considering.
The heavier the planet, the stronger the pull. If you double the
planet's mass, gravity pulls twice as hard. On the other hand,
the farther the planet is from the sun, the weaker the pull
between the two. The force gets weaker quite rapidly. If you
double the distance, the force is one-fourth. If you triple the
separation, the force drops to one-ninth. Ten times the
distance, one-hundredth the force. See the pattern? The force
drops off with the square of the distance. If we put this into
an equation it would look like this:

The two "M's" on top are the sun's mass and the planet's
mass. The "r" below is the distance between the two. The
masses are in the numerator because the force gets bigger if
they get bigger. The distance is in the denominator because
the force gets smaller when the distance gets bigger. Note
that the force never becomes zero no matter how far you
travel. Knowing this law helps you inderstand why the planets
move faster when they are closer to the sun - they are pulled
on with a stronger force and are whipped around faster!
It’s copied from
http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/age/index.html