Elliptic orbit

Imagine you are playing a game where you have to throw a ball to land it in a basket that is moving in a circle. But instead of being a perfect circle, the ball's path is shaped like an oval. That's called an elliptic orbit!

The ball, in this case, is a planet or a spacecraft, and the basket is a star that the planet is orbiting around. The shape of the ball's path is determined by the forces acting on it, like gravity, which pulls the planet towards the star.

If the planet was moving fast enough and in the right direction when it was first launched, it would go into an elliptic orbit. The shape of the orbit would depend on how fast it was going and how far away it was from the star.

Sometimes the planet would be really close to the star (at one end of the oval), and other times it would be really far away (at the other end of the oval). This is why some planets, like Mercury, have really hot and cold temperatures – because they're closer to the star at some points and farther away at others.

So, an elliptic orbit is like playing basketball with a ball that moves in an oval shape instead of a circle. And just like how the shape of the ball's path would depend on the forces acting on it, the shape of a planet's orbit depends on gravity and other forces in space.