Why Venus Turns at a Crawl
Sunlight would appear to rise in the west on Venus, a perverse clockwork fact: the planet turns in retrograde rotation so slowly that one sidereal spin lasts about 243 Earth days, while its orbit around the Sun takes about 225. The arithmetic is almost rude. More than celestial trivia, that mismatch reveals angular momentum being negotiated by a planet, its air, and the star it circles.The obvious...More
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