Why does Venus rotate so slowly?
827722
The very slow rotation of Venus and the "backward" (retrograde) rotation might mean that it collided, in the past (probably toward the end of their formation), with an object of similar size.\n\nThe slow rotation may also have something to do with tidal lock with the Sun. Just an idea I am not sure.
413916
Well there are alot of theories about why this occurs, however until we actually send some probes there to test the theories and find the right one, we are basically just making guesses. But probably the fact that Venus has a very slow rotational period which does not produce the dynamo effect is the reason. More about the magnetic field of Venus is here\nhttp://www-spc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/papers/venus_mag/\n\nMercury probably still has a bit of a molten core\nhttp://www-spc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/papers/merc_mag/\n\nBasically the theories don't explain everything we observe,\nDoes this mean the theories or science are wrong? No, it just probably means we are not taking everything into account. And that we have missed something. This is what makes science so interesting. We find discrepancies and we have to discover the reason. So we think about it, come up with new or modified theories, and then design tests to determine which are correct. This is what science is all about. Here is another website I found that explains a bit about it, enjoy.\nhttp://www.astronomynotes.com/solarsys/s7.htm
589353
Neptunes axis spins counter clockwise. the rest also do the same except three of them; venus:clockwise, Uranus: rotates on side, Pluto: rotates down
755991
We do not have a real explanation...\nDuring the stage of formation of the solar system, the gases and dust accumulated to form one big blog, the sun, and several other blogs that became planets.  This cloud of dust was animated with a small rotation, and each blog rotated with slight differences.  The Sun formed, and the rest of the dust became planets, still with some remaining rotation.  At that time, many small blogs were floating around and hitting each other.  It is likely that, at that stage, Venus (or what would become Venus) was hit by another rock, changed rotation, and still running that way.\nSo, no, Venus is not "special".  It is just another rock that was formed at the time...
210557
i think the minimum temp of venus is its Day-side temperature which is  40° C/104° F. while its overall surface temperature is highly uniform and its about 462° C. i hope this info helps.. :)
749690
over 400 °C.Thermal inertia and the transfer of heat by winds in the lower atmosphere mean that the temperature of Venus' surface does not vary significantly between the night and day sides, despite the planet's extremely slow rotation. Winds at the surface are slow, moving at a few kilometers per hour, but because of the high density of the atmosphere at Venus' surface, they exert a significant amount of force against obstructions, and transport dust and small stones across the surface.\nclick here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Atmosphere\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
174227
The sun rotates on its axis about once every 27 days.\n\n"enables" is not quite the work I would use to describe it, but the sun rotates due to the law of conservation of angular momentum.\n\nWhen the sun way forming out of a giant cloud of dust millions of years ago, that dust was very slowly moving.  When the dust started to condense, the roation sped up.  The more it condenses, the faster it rotations due to the law of conservation of [angular] momentum.
762828
Jason, that's bullshit.\n\nOur planet doesn't have to rotate at any particular pace to stay in this orbit.\n\nObviously though, if it rotated 20x slower, the days would be 20x longer and the nights would be 20x longer as well.  This would mean that part of the Earth would heat up much more while the other side cooled much more.  As long as we still had an atmosphere like the one we have now, this would probably cause a lot of storms and wind also due to the extreme tempurature differences.
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.
543004
Technically, the general rotation direction of the Sun and most planets is a leftover from the original solar nebula from which the Solar System formed.  As the planets and Sun coalesced, they retained the rotation direction of the original nebula.\n\nDuring the coalescence phase, asteroid-size chunks collided and stuck together.  As more and more of these chunks collected, the planets grew in size.  However, these chunks not only brought mass to the mix, they also brought momentum.  Since most of the materials were probably all travelling in more or less the same direction, the general rotation direction of the growing planets remained the same.\n\nIn the case of Venus and Uranus, it is suspected that a major collision between the planet and another body literally tipped the planets over due to an off-center orientation of the collision.  Uranus tipped over on its side, probably due to its size relative to the other body.  Venus, being smaller, tipped so far over that its rotation was reversed.
388209
For years it was thought that in the case of Venus that the Earth was the culprit. It is a curious fact that as Venus rotates three times on its axis in 729.27 days, the Earth goes twice around the Sun ( 728.50 days) This has suggested to many dynamicists that Earth and Venus are locked into a 3:2 tidal resonance. There are many bodies in the solar system that seem to be locked into various kinds of spin-orbit resonances, especially families of asteroids with the planet Jupiter. Mercury also seems to be gravitationally locked into some kind of resonance with the Sun since its day (58.646 days) and its year ( 87.969 days) are also in the proportion of 3:2. \n\nwhat happened in essence is that venus spins once a year which is about zero rotation in the normal planetary sense.  evidently the way the solar system formed it just sucked the spin out of venus.  that probably accounts for why it's a greenhouse.
662166
A longish answer I picked up from the source link in reply to question 26 on the page. I'm quoting it verbatim herebelow\n\nQuote"\nBecause whatever it arose from--probably a cloud of gas and dust--was rotating to begin with.\n\nThe thing to keep in mind that even a very slow rotation of a cloud of objects gets greatly speeded up as it condenses at the center. The reason is a basic law (a consequence of Newton's laws of motion) by which a quantity known as ANGULAR MOMENTUM (or rotational momentum) is conserved. The angular momentum can be defined as the average radial distance, TIMES the average velocity of motion, TIMES the mass.\n\nThe mass does not change when matter collects near the axis of rotation, so we neglect the last part. Then, if the material collectes in the middle, where its average radius of rotation is 10, 100 or 1000 times smaller, the average velocity of its particles increases by the same factor.\n\nYou see this happen every day. When water drains from a filled bathroom sink, even if the water in the sink is rotating so slowly that you do not notice, by the time it reaches the drain it is spinning rapidly enough to form a funnel. (It does not spin in the opposite direction in Australia: the effect on which this claim is based is far too weak to have much effect. See "Stargazers," section 24). You also see this in hurricanes and tornadoes.\n\nAnd you see it happen when a large object in space collapses. In 1054 a star "went supernova" in the constellation of the Crab, a process in which the top layers blow off and the core collapses to a tiny "neutron star," perhaps 15 km across and as massive as the Sun. The collapsed core of the Crab Nebula apparently rotates 30 times a second, because that is the frequency at which it blinks in x-rays and radio (and I believe in its light, too).\n\nIn the solar system all planets orbit in the same direction and nearly in the same plane, and they and the Sun rotate in the same direction too (= counterclockwise, viewed from north). This suggests that they all condensed from the same cloud."   Unquote
772523
No.  The reason is a bit complex for someone not already familiar with the conservation of rotational inertia.  But the short answer is that Jupiter is probably moving very, very slowly away from the Sun.  Our moon is moving very, very slowly away from the Earth.  Each body that has satellites has what is called a "Roche limit".  Jupiter and Earth would be outside of the Sun's Roche limit so they will move slowly farther away.  Our moon is outside Earth's Roche limit and will move slowly farther away.   Mars is pretty cool.  Mars has 2 very small moons.  One, Diemos, is farther away from Mars and outside its Roche limit.  It will also continue to move farther away ever so slowly.  But the other moon, Phobos, is a bit closer and inside of Mars' Roche limit.  It will ever so slowly move closer to Mars until it spirals down and eventually collides.  COOL, huh?
1038744
The moon is only visible because the Sun light reflects off of it. Even if the Sun is in the sky at the  same time, we will see it. The Moon circles the Earth every 28 days. While the Earth rotates once every 24 hours. The result is that the Moon seems to change position in the sky by 1/28 of a full rotation every day. During that cycle, the Sun and Moon will be in the daytime sky at least half the time. Sometimes we don't notice the Moon because it is only a small wedge or the clouds hide it. \nBy the way, Venus is also visible during daylight hours during some of it's rotation,  but it is a very tiny  pinpoint of light and is very hard to locate even if it is bright.
532654
Well Venus is much closer to the sun than we are so it is a lot hotter there... stuff that exists as a liquid here (water) would only be able to be a gas there due to the high temps. This also makes the atmosphere there much denser than ours. Not much sunlight would penetrate the thick atmosphere so there isn't any plant life to contribute oxygen to and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere the way plants do here.
281708
Dominique sort of brushed why parts of the atmosphere can move so fast. The reason is the pressure gradient force. The jet stream is partially directed by Coriolis (Earth rotation) but mostly powered by large air masses that squeeze it into a narrow stream. The effect is much like the narrowing of a large river down a narrow canyon - the air gets squeezed into this meandering jet.\n\nNot all the atmosphere moves faster than the rotation of the earth, and atmospheric rotation has two separate components - that which rotates with the sphere and that which rotates more 2-dimensionally (vertical or horizontal) with respect to the surface of the planet. Some air is almost stagnant, but most moves around in all directions, only the jet streams have consistent westerly flows (west to east) which usually dips in wide northerly and sourtherly loops. \n\nThe core of the planet actually consistently rotates faster than anything else.
334758
it's Venus  it's hotter then mercury\n\nVenus has an atmosphere consisting mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen, with a pressure at the surface about 90 times that of Earth (a pressure equivalent to a depth of 1 kilometer under Earth's oceans); its atmosphere is also roughly 90 times more massive than ours. This enormously CO2-rich atmosphere results in a strong greenhouse effect that raises the surface temperature more than 400 °C (750 °F) with temperatures at the surface reaching extremes as great as 500 °C (930 °F) in low elevation regions near the planet's equator. This makes Venus's surface hotter than Mercury's, even though Venus is nearly twice as distant from the Sun and only receives 25% of the solar irradiance (2613.9 W/m² in the upper atmosphere, and just 1071.1 W/m² at the surface). Owing to the thermal inertia and convection of its dense atmosphere, the temperature does not vary significantly between the night and day sides of Venus, despite its extremely slow rotation. Upper atmosphere winds circling the planet approximately every 4 Earth-days help distribute the heat to other areas on the surface.