Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-physics-1-paper-of-the-university-of-oxford/2017-resit/3/solution
Past exam of the physics 1 paper of the University of Oxford 2017 resit 3 Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
For planets with negligible mass compared with the Sun, Kepler's third law gives , where is the semi-major axis. Relative to Earth,Thus the requested orbital-distance estimates are about 0.39 and 5.2 times Earth's. Strictly, the period fixes the semi-major axis, not a time-averaged radius of an arbitrary eccentric orbit; identifying the two as a mean distance is the usual elementary orbital-size convention.
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