Why are planetary orbits elliptical and not circular?
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If you idealise orbits to two body problem, they are conic sections. That is hyperbola, parabola, ellipse or circle. Circle is a very exact thing, it really only has one degree of freedom whereas ellipse has two. You could say there is only one circle, but many ellipses. In nature you don’t really get such precise perfect things as a circle, so planets have elliptical orbits, that are really quite close to circular, just not exactly.
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