Sun rises in the west and sets in the east: Why does Venus have an opposite spin?
Venus isn't just inhospitable, it's also astronomically strange, and one of its most interesting things about it is that it spins in the opposite direction to most planets, including Earth.
Apart from this, another interesting aspect is that a single day on Venus lasts longer than its year, which means that Venus takes around 243 Earth days to complete one full spin on its axis, but only about 224 Earth days to orbit the Sun.
That means a Venusian 'day' is longer than its entire 'year.'
The planet where the sun rises in the west
Unlike Earth and most other planets in the solar system, Venus rotates from east to west. That means, if you could stand on its surface, you'd see the sun rise in the west and set in the east. This kind of backward rotation is called 'retrograde rotation.' For a long time, scientists believed Venus originally spun in the same direction as the rest of the planets but later flipped upside down.
The idea was that Venus's axis tilted a full 180 degrees, causing the rotation to appear reversed when viewed from space. According to Nature, earlier theories suggested that this flip could have happened due to powerful atmospheric tides. The tides that are driven by the sun's gravitational pull on Venus's thick atmosphere may have caused friction between the planet's core and mantle, eventually triggering the complete axis reversal.
Maybe the axis didn't flip at all
However, researchers Alexandre Correira and Jacques Laskar from the French research institute Astronomie et Systemes Dynamiques give a completely different view of this theory. In a paper published in Nature, they propose that Venus may not have flipped upside down.
Instead, 'its rotation slowed to a standstill and then reversed direction.'
Using computer simulations that considered solar tides, atmospheric friction, and gravitational pulls from other planets, the team showed that Venus could have naturally shifted into a retrograde state without needing to flip its axis. Their study revealed that Venus's spin is influenced by several possible rotational states, which includes two in a forward direction and two in a reverse direction.
'The researchers add that Venus would be more stable in one of the two retrograde rotational states,' reports Nature. Possibly, Venus was likely destined to spin backward at some point, it was just a matter of time.
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