Dear readers, thank you for reading my article in your busy schedule, this is an affirmation of my efforts, but also the motivation to continue to create, I would like to extend my most sincere respect to you, I hope to get one of you"Attention"Thank you!In our solar system, when viewed from the Sun's North Pole, almost all the planets rotate counterclockwise, except for Venus and Uranus. These planets rotate clockwise, and this rotation is called retrograde. But why do planets rotate like this?
In order to understand why planets rotate in the same direction, you first need to understand why they rotate.
As we wrote in previous articles: stars and planets are formed from huge clouds of gas and dust. The matter in these clouds is in constant motion, and the clouds themselves move, revolving around the center of the galaxy. As a result of this movement and interaction with other clouds and stars, the cloud will rotate at least a little around its axis (the speed of rotation of each particular cloud depends on many factors). As a result of this rotation, the cloud has angular momentum, which, according to the laws of physics, does not disappear without a trace, but can only be transferred to another object.
When an interstellar cloud shrinks, it becomes smaller fragments, each of which shrinks independently of the others and carries some of the original angular momentum. The swirling clouds form a protostellar disk, from which individual stars and their planets are formed. In this case, most of the angular momentum is transferred to the residual accretion disk around the star. Exactly how this phenomenon occurs is unknown, but scientists believe that this shift is related to the strong magnetic fields of newborn stars. Since the planets are formed by the further merger of the materials in this disk, they receive all the remaining angular momentum, and since it has one direction for the whole cloud, all the planets are forced to rotate around the Sun and its axis in the same direction.
Venus rotates clockwise around its axis, and Uranus's axis of rotation is very inclined to the plane of the solar system, so Uranus revolves around the Sun, so to speak, "lying on its side". Also, unlike other planets, it rotates in the opposite direction like Venus.
For some time on Venus, astronomers believed that the cause of Venus's abnormal rotation was the Earth. The fact is that the period of Venus's rotation around its axis is 72927 Earth days. During this time, the Earth made two revolutions around the Sun (72850 days). Therefore, scientists propose that the Earth and Venus are in a state of tidal resonance. Some asteroid families have such resonances with Jupiter, and Mercury with the Sun as well.
But it was later discovered that the Earth's gravitational pull was not strong enough for Venus to resonate and cause it to go retrograde. Now, scientists are inclined to believe that Venus, during its formation, was forced to rotate in opposite directions due to certain events that occurred in the distant past. Venus could collide with a large protoplanet, and its mass and momentum could fundamentally alter the angular momentum of Venus. As a result, the direction and speed of its rotation have changed, becoming what it is now.
In a similar way, modern science explains the abnormal rotation of Uranus;The only remaining question is what collided with these planets and what is it in now?
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