why does venus rotate backward compared to other planets in our system?
479177
Venus could be thought of as simply upside down. Something might have knocked it over. Current thinking in the field says that Venus was hit with a "mini planet" during formation and violently knocked over. Uranus might have suffered a similar blow (it is rotating perpendicular to the solar system, rolling on it's side). Crater evidence supports the existence of large mini-planets in the early days of our solar system. Some of these are the moons of the outer planets. Our own moon may be the result of such a collision with earth that flung material into orbit (everything may have been molten at this time). No one knows for sure. Venus also has a 3:2 rotational period with earth's orbit with the sun. Some think that this is due to a tidal resonance. Mercury also has a 3:2 proportion day to year. This resonance may also cause a wobble (earth wobbles due to the moon's tidal resonance), but it is unlikely this was strong enough to cause Venus's retrograde rotation.
442092
No effect at all.  In fact when I run simulations of solar system dynamics I regulalarly exclude Pluto from my calculations when I am focusing on things in the inner solar system.\n\nA planet "in retrograde" just means that as viewed from earth they are moving "backwards" on the sky, they do this every time we catch up to and pass them in our orbit.  Pluto "retrogrades" every year.
936482
They are almost sister planets in that they are very close to the same size.  Earth is slightly denser.\n\nHowever, Earth is paradise to Venus' hell.  On Venus the atmosphere is over 70x denser than Earths, meaning you'd be crushed into a bloodspot the instant you stepped outside.  On the other hand, the 800 degree temperature would take you out first.  That is, if the sulfuric atmosphere didn't choke you out of existence.\n\nThere's nothing remotely similar to Earth on Venus.  They are similar in size, nothing more.
648060
coz, Venus has lots of Green House gases, that don't allow the heat radiations absorbed from the SUN, to bounce back into space..Hence it keeps accumulating all that heat and  thereby raising the Planet's Temperature.. & the same thing will happen to Earth, if we don't control the Green House gases emmited day by day!!!....\n\n\nand as for Mercury... it just has a feeble atmosphere...
935070
Yes.  It is not strictly linear -- Venus has a far higher pressure than Earth does, even though its gravity is slightly less.  But generally it is true.  When you study Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics, you will learn why.  The chemical composition and temperature of the atmosphere are important factors.
709806
A day on Venus is longer than a year because it spins the other way.\nSaturn has rings, and so does Jupiter and other giants!\nMars sometime seems to be going backward in the sky!\nUranus spins on its side (the same pole always points to the Sun)\nMercuray and Venus have no moon, and Jupiter and Saturn have new ones being discovered all the time.\nPluto is no longer a planet because it's too small and its orbit is too oval.
347854
It's pretty arbitrary isn't it? Look down on the North pole and the earth is turning clockwise, look down on the South Pole and it's the other way around.\n\nA more interesting question is: why are (almost) all planets orbiting and rotating in the same direction?\n\nThe solar system, earth included, is supposed to have formed from a dust cloud that contracted due to gravity. This cloud rotated in a certain way. As spin has to be conserved, all bodies in the solar system rotate in the same way.
657305
It is basically the reverse is true.  All the planets revolving round the sun are trying to move away from the sun.  The sun exerts some magnetic forces that keep the planets revolve in their own orbits.  The forces acting on a planet at a given time are both repulsive and attractive.  They are almost equivalent in magnitude and the difference is very meagre.  They nullify each other and that is why the planets are in place.  More over the planets are they themselves in motion whereby an equilibrium is attained between the motion of planets and that of the sun.\n\nMore over the universe is itself a giant magnetic field which is in space and the planets are kept in motion inside it.  There are many such universes available in space (as per scientists & astronomers).
347602
It's called 'retrograde' and it is has to do with how the orbits of Earth and Mars differ. Here's a good source for you, \nhttp://www.astro.uiuc.edu/projects/data/Retrograde/\nhttp://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/allabout/nightsky/nightsky04.html
111203
I think the current theory is that it comes from the origin of the solar system as a spinning mass of material. This material had a certain angular momentum, which was retained as the material coalesced into the sun and the planets and moons and other bodies. So there are only a few planets and moons whose orbital and rotational angular momentum vectors are not aligned with each other (like Neptune, and Venus, Triton and a few of the smaller, more distant moons of Jupiter and Saturn).
602063
Venus, the second planet from the Sun, is thought to be similar to the Earth in many ways.  Its diameter is just slightly smaller than the Earth's, and it is believed that Venus weighs just  slightly less than the Earth.  \n\nThe surface of Venus is thought to be covered by plains and mountains much like the Earth.  There appear to be a few active volcanoes, and it is believed that Venus was covered by many active volcanoes millions of years ago. \n\nUnlike the Earth, there are no craters left behind by meteorites, and Venus has no moons or satellites.  Venus has no oceans, water, ice, or water vapor on its surface or in its atmosphere.  Instead, Venus is covered by a very thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid.  \n\nIts thick atmosphere produces a powerful "greenhouse effect," causing the temperature to rise to 740 degrees.  Many astrophysicists believe that water did exist on Venus at one time, but that it was boiled away by the "greenhouse effect."\n\nVenus is the third brightest object in the sky; only the Sun and the Moon are brighter.  Because of its brightness, it is believed that Venus has been observed since prehistoric times.\n\nVenus rotates very slowly on its axis.  It takes 243 Earth days for Venus to make one complete rotation on its axis.  Venus revolves around the Sun slightly faster than it rotates on its axis.  In other words, a day on Venus lasts longer than one Venetian year.  \n\nVenus also rotates backwards or retrograde when compared to the Earth and the other planets in our solar system.
63676
These are good questions. I do not think anyone knows exactly, but I have heard the conjecture often that Pluto is an escaped moon or a captured planet from somewhere else, and was not present at the formation of the Solar System. Also it is possible that Pluto's strange orbit is the result of some collision. \n\nThe rotational angular momentum of Uranus is quite different from the other planets. It's rotational axis is tilted significantly from the orthogonal to the ecliptic (plane of orbits of most planets), and it is said to rotate in the "opposite" sense to earth and the sun and some of the other planets. However, since the tilt of Uranus' rotational axis is roughly 97.92 degrees, I do not know how strongly I would want to assert that it rotates in the opposite or retrograde sense to most of the other bodies in the solar system. Again, this could be caused by a collision. In one of the attached references, it is claimed that this could be caused by a tidal effect, but it is hard for me to understand how. \n\nIt turns out that both Pluto and Venus also rotate in a retrograde sense, so it is not that uncommon, although theories of the origin of the solar system imply that one would not expect a lot of deviations of angular momentum from the major direction of angular momentum in the system. In the case of our system, especially given the orbits of the planets with small inclinations to the ecliptic, and the very large angular momenta of the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn, this is basically correct. \n\nNeptune is probably called the blue planet because it is blue, although of course Uranus and Earth are blue as well (for different reasons). Neptune's blue is at least partly caused by the presence of methane in its atmosphere.
710856
Transits of Venus across the Sun were state-of-the-art science back in the 18th century.  That's because they were a way to calculate the size of the Solar System.   By the middle of the 18th century, Newtonian mechanics had allowed us to make a model of the Solar System where everything was correct, except that we didn't know how big it was.  Everything was done as angles from the Earth, and so the whole thing could have been bigger or smaller and still kept the same angles.  This uncertainty prevented us from knowing the size of the Sun and the distance to the stars.\n\nBut if you observed a transit of Venus from two places far apart on the Earth, like England and Tahiti, you would see the disk of Venus cross the disk of the Sun in a different path.  This would allow you to calculate the distance to Venus in comparison to the size of the Earth, which was by then well known.  Expeditions were sent out by the European powers to observe the transits of Venus from "remote" places.
179307
Planets do not follow the same exact pathway. They are farther away from the sun. However, they still do rotate around the sun. (If they were in the same line, the planets would collide) The farther out the planets are, the longer time it takes them to revolve around the sun. This is why pluto takes an extremely long time to revolve once around, while the Earth year is only 365 days. Mercury has a year even SHORTER than the earth@
453860
Because the same face of the planet is not shown to sun all the time. The planet revolves as well as spin about its axis. so face that is exposed to sun changes with time. This is the very reason for day and night.
29403
The planets were formed by the same cloud of swirling rocks and dust, so when they came together and formed the planets they were all going the same direction. And actually, since the sun was made from the same stuff, it actually rotates in the same direction, though it is hard to tell because there are no surface details to see from earth without assistance to see the movement of the sun. I think astronomers see the rotation of the sun by watching sun spots. \n\nAnd actually they do not all lie in a flat plane. There is actually a small difference between the orbital planes of each of the planets.
328856
Time is unconnected to the Earth.  The only immediately noticeable differences between normal Earth and a backward rotating Earth (NOT counting the moment during which the Earth stops spinning) is that water will circulate in the opposite direction in the ocean, counterclockwise instead of clockwise, and storms will rotate across the Earth in a different directional tendency.