Here is an interesting video from NBC News that discusses the rotation of Venus: So, nobody is 100% sure about what happened to Venus’s rotation, but we can almost be sure that Venus originally rotated counter-clockwise. The first impact actually formed a moon, but another impact on the opposite side reversed its rotation and caused the moon to also collided with Venus, hence the Venus we have today. Indeed, another uniqueness of Venus is that the planet has no satellite/moon at all.Īlex Alemi and David Stevenson from Caltech proposed that there have been not one, but two of these impacts in Venus’s long history. The theory is that the same collision also happened with Venus, but the phenomenon didn’t form a satellite, but rather stopped and reversed Venus’s rotation. Our Moon, for example, was believed to be formed when a Marz-sized ‘planet’ collided with the Earth, and the Moon is the leftover material that has merged. Theory #2Īnother theory is that in the early days of our Solar System, there were a lot more objects, planets, and mini-planets that orbited our Sun, and they clash with each other leaving only the planets and satellites we have today. However, nowadays experts agree that the force generated by the Earth doesn’t seem to be strong enough to flip Venus’s rotation. It was believed that this tidal resonance was what caused Venus’s odd rotation direction. Earth goes twice around the Sun in 728.50 days, while at the same period Venus rotates three times on its axis (in 729.27 days), so Earth and Venus are locked in a 3:2 tidal resonance. In the past, however, it is widely accepted that Earth was actually the culprit. Sometime between the formation of Venus and today, these strong tides caused the flip in Venus’s rotation. One of the most widely held beliefs is that due to Venus’s extremely dense atmosphere, the Sun also offers a very strong gravitational pull to the planet, causing strong atmospheric tides. There are a few theories to explain why Venus rotates clockwise instead of counter-clockwise. It is believed that in the distant past, Venus rotated in the same direction, but something came along that changed the rotational direction of Venus (and Uranus). So, why does Venus rotate differently from our Earth and all the other planets except Uranus? However, Venus, unlike our earth, has a very hot temperature and extreme air pressure, so although they look similar to each other, they are also very different. ![]() The second planet in our Solar System has a similar mass, size, density, and even chemical composition to our Earth. Venus is often thought of as the twin brother (or sister) of our Earth. Uranus, however, is rather unique that the planet is tilted almost 90° on its side, making its direction of rotation rather ambiguous, but many experts agree that Uranus also rotates clockwise. Venus’s revolution cycle is once every 225 Earth days, but it rotates clockwise with a period of 243 days. However, Venus and possibly Uranus are the anomalies in our solar system, as they rotate clockwise rather than counter-clockwise. The sun itself also rotates in the counterclockwise direction. The same phenomenon even can be seen in asteroids and the satellites of the planets like our Moon. ![]() In fact, one of the most remarkable feats of our Milky Way galaxy is that nearly all the revolutions and rotations of the objects in it are in the same direction. They inherited their rotation from the overall movement of the Solar System itself.Most planets in our solar system-including our Earth-spins counter-clockwise, and it is considered the normal direction of rotation in our solar system. The Sun formed from the bulge at the center of this disk, and the planets formed further out. ![]() We see this same structure throughout the Universe: the shape of galaxies, around rapidly spinning black holes, and we even see it in pizza restaurants. This is the conservation of angular momentum at work.Īs the Solar System spun more rapidly, it flattened out into a disk with a bulge in the middle. Like a figure skater pulling in her arms to spin more rapidly, the collapsing proto-Solar System with its averaged out particle momentum began to spin faster and faster. Which means, there will be some left over. It might be possible to average out perfectly to zero, but it’s really really unlikely. As these atoms glom onto one another with gravity, they need to average out their momentum. Each particle has its own momentum as it drifts through the void. Think about the individual atoms in the cloud of hydrogen. It’s the conservation of angular momentum.
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