How did Descartes’s mechanical view describe the movement of planets?

In René Descartes’s mechanical philosophy, the movement of planets was explained through the concept of vortices. Descartes rejected the idea that bodies could act upon one another through empty space, positing instead that the universe is filled with a material substance called "ether".123

According to this view, planets are swept around the Sun by massive whirlpools, or vortices, of this subtle matter. These vortices function like a whirlwind, carrying celestial bodies along with them. Because Descartes held that all natural phenomena result from the collisions of moving bodies, he argued that these planetary motions were purely mechanical, occurring without the need for final causes or inherent purposes in nature. While this model provided a mechanistic alternative to the Aristotelian system, it was eventually superseded by Newtonian physics, which utilized the concept of gravitational force to explain planetary orbits.1243