Kepler's laws of planetary motion formula_16 The area enclosed by the elliptical orbit is formula_17 So the period formula_18 satisfies and the mean motion of the planet around the Sun satisfies This captures the relationship between the distance of planets from the Sun, and their orbital periods. Kepler enunciated in 1619 this third law in a laborious attempt to determine what he viewed as the "music of the spheres" according to precise laws, and express it in terms of musical notation. So it was known as the "harmonic law". Using Newton's Law of gravitation (published 1687), this relation can be found in the case of
Speed of gravity to explain the perihelion advance of Mercury, but they could not provide exact values. One exception was Maurice Lévy in 1890, who succeeded in doing so by combining the laws of Weber and Riemann, whereby the speed of gravity is equal to the speed of light. So those hypotheses were rejected. However, a more important variation of those attempts was the theory of Paul Gerber, who derived in 1898 the identical formula, which was also derived later by Einstein for the perihelion advance. Based on that formula, Gerber calculated a propagation speed for gravity of 305 000 km/s, i.e. practically