Due to it's slow rotation it actually completes a full rotation of the sun before it itself fully rotates.

top 40 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 120 points 11 months ago

the datetime library developer takes another bottle from the liquor cabinet

  • source
  • [–] 60 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (12 children)

    I love how much of a rebel non-conformist Venus is. Years longer than its days, rotates the opposite direction than all other planets because fuck you, thats why. And don't you even THINK about getting close and trying to land on her. Just ask the Russians how that went. You can't handle her pressure, temperature nor toxic atmosphere. What a bad bitch. She doesn't need nor ask your permission to do jack shit.

  • source
  • hideshow 12 child comments
  • [–] 34 points 11 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    rotates the opposite direction

    By this, you mean its rotation around its own axis?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Yeah, most planets have the same rotation direction as orbital direction (counter-clockwise rotation, counter-clockwise orbit) but Venus rotates clockwise.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

    Then there is Neptune Uranus that just rolls around...

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    Uranus rotates on its side. Instead of rotating with its axis roughly perpendicular to the plane of its orbit (like all the other planets in our Solar System), Uranus rotates on its side (along its orbital path). This tipped rotational axis gives rise to extreme seasons on Uranus.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 53 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

    It kinda depends how you define "a day". The usual standard colloquial definition we use would be a "solar day", i.e. how long it takes for it to go dark and light once each, i.e. noon to noon.

    The definition you're using in this post though is a "sidereal day", which if you just say "a day" no one would mean, thus this post is misleading. A sidereal day is how long a planet needs to spin around itself.

    A Venus "solar (normal) day" (like we normally use the phrase "day") is 116.75 earth days, while a Venus year is 224.7 earth days. The "sidereal day" that you're talking about here is 243 earth days long. So a day on Venus is actually shorter than a year on Venus, at least if you use our usual definition of "day".

    Since Venus itself spins opposite to its orbit around the sun, its own spin together with its orbiting around the sun add up together to make the "solar (normal) day" shorter.

    An Earth sidereal day is 23 hours 56 minutes while its solar day is 24 hours long. Here, the sidereal day is shorter than the solar day, because the Earth spins in the same direction as its orbit.

    Sources: [1] [2]

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago (11 children)

    Wow that is incredible. Isn’t Venus year equal to 200 or so Earth Days?

  • source
  • hideshow 11 child comments
  • [–] 27 points 11 months ago (10 children)

    Pretty sure it also spins the "wrong way" compared to all the other planets, probably a massive impact at some point stopped it spinning and sent it backwards slowly

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • [–] 22 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    That's a good observation. I think you're right. It really is insane how much evidence of impacts and other forms of geological trauma is extant on other worlds

    Makes you imagine if the galaxies didn't spin so slow (relative to human timescales), we'd be watching rippling shrapnel as shit collides with one another in real time

    Space is so cool, fuck

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Are there any ramifications of that?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    According to Superman (1978), time would move backwards.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    I think (although I could be wrong), that that film was trying to depict that Superman was flying so fast that he went back in time. And the best visual they could come up with was that the earth was spinning "backwards" in order to depict this.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Could this also have contributed to the massive greenhouse effect it has?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    My son went back to college in his late 20s to get a degree that might lead to a job, so he was in class with a lot of 18 year olds.

    He had a astrophysics class, and got in an argument with a girl who insisted that the Sun went around the Earth. He asked her how the length of a year was measured, and she said that long, long ago, some guys just chose an arbitrary number of days to make a year.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    Hey OP! I'd rather spend a day with you than on Venus!

  • source
  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    This one fact always blows my mind.

  • source
  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    quality TIL post. we didn’t know this either!

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Are we talking sidereal day or solar day? Both?

  • source
  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    I think my physics teacher told me this fact but followed it up with "Measuring a planet's rotation around the sun by how fast it rotates around it's center is like trying to measure the speed of a truck based on how many rotations a ballerina can spin inside of it."

    That quote haunts me.

  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    Bit silly. In this scenario, you're not measuring the speed of the truck. You're measuring the time it takes to complete a lap. And we are the ballerina rotating, and as we are a miniature plastic ballerina with no outside frame of reference, our own regular rotation is the only consistent measure we have.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Cite your source ffs

  • source