Why Do Planets Rotate?


A long-standing theory is that Venus once orbited like other planets, but billions of years ago, a planet-sized object crashed into it. One of the oldest hypotheses is that Venus and Uranus originally rotated counter-clockwise – as our planet and planets still do – but at some point they collided with massive objects (possibly other planets) that caused them to rotate in different directions.

Planets rotate because of the conservation of angular momentum. Angular moment is not destroyed, and most particles possess it. So planets rotate because the things they are made of rotate, and the net rotation is quite large. The rotation of a planet allows it to have an atmosphere.

Since the suns and planets form from the same rotating cloud, this is also the reason why they all rotate in the same direction. This is why all the planets move in the same orbit and why almost all of them rotate in the same direction.

How Moons Appear within a Planet’s Pull

If it is formed in the planet’s gravitational field during the formation of the planet, the moon will orbit the planet in the same direction that the planet rotates, and is an ordinary moon. If an object is formed elsewhere and subsequently orbited by the planet’s gravity, it may go into a retrograde orbit or move forward depending on whether it first approaches the side of the planet that is orbiting toward or away from it.

For example, when viewed from the top of the ecliptic (an imaginary plane that corresponds to what was the solar system’s protostellar disk), the Earth rotates counterclockwise, which is the same direction it orbits the Sun. To begin with, Venus rotates in the opposite direction to most other planets, including the Earth, so the sun rises in the west on Venus.

The planets revolve around the Sun in the direction of the Sun’s rotation, that is, counter-clockwise when viewed from above the Sun’s north pole, the Sun’s rotation. As you might expect, the Sun’s axis of rotation is again within about 7 degrees of the orbit. planets. One would expect the orbits to be randomly oriented, since gravity—the force that keeps the planets in these stable orbits—works the same way in all three dimensions.

Today we mapped the orbits of the planets with incredible accuracy and found that the four inner planets revolve around the Sun – all of them – in the same plane with a maximum accuracy of 7 degrees difference.

The Importance of Gas and Dust Accretion

Because the four inner outer are formed from asymmetric clouds of gas, it collapses first in the shortest direction; the material “slaps” and sticks; it contracts inward, but ends up orbiting around a center where the planets are formed by the protoplanetary disk The defects form; they all end up rotating in the same plane, within a few degrees at most of each other. The swirling cloud was flattened into a protostellar disk, from which individual stars and their planets formed.

Rotation is simply the result of the initial rotation of clouds of gas and dust that condense to form the sun and planets. Before stars and their planets appeared, there was only a disorganized cloud of gas and small molecules.

The sun was born from a cloud of dust and gas, and the remnants of these dust and gas, called the solar nebula, became the planets. If this were the initial rotational state of the clouds of gas and dust that formed our solar system, we could easily find ourselves in a solar system spinning clockwise around the sun.

The reason the planets move at the precise speed that allows the planets to revolve around the sun (rather than orbiting the sun or in space) is not coincidence or evidence of divine intervention, but goes back to the fact that the solar system was just spinning. cloud. gas and dust.

Why don’t planets fall into the sun?

The reason planets don’t just fall into the Sun is because they move fast enough to “lose” it all the time. With the exception of Hyperion, all known natural satellites of planets in the solar system are tidally linked to their host planet, so they have zero rotation relative to their host planet, but have the same type of rotation as their host planet.

The Sun because they orbit in a direct orbit around their host planet. Rotation does not appear to be related to rotation time, orbital time, or even whether some planets are tidally locked or not. Interestingly, each planet’s rotation patterns can help determine whether they can support life or not.

The slow rotation lengthens the days and nights, so that half of the planet is illuminated for a long time by the sun itself. Speculation may explain Venus’s very low rotation rate today: Venus takes 243 Earth days to make a complete revolution, but only 225 Earth days to orbit the Sun.

The orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars rotate faster than the outer planets because Mercury’s orbits have less distance to travel. A planet in a closed orbit relative to its star, its star does not rotate relative to its star; rotates once (essentially its day) in the same period as its year (orbital period) from an outside perspective.

In any case, the bottom line is that a star like the sun spins from the initial angular momentum present in the solar nebula that formed the solar nebula. Furthermore, all orbital motion (including rotation) of the planet is due to this initial angular momentum. You say that the initial angular momentum of the cloud causes the orbital motion and rotation of the planet (mostly). This idea of ​​tidal vapor, where the dense atmosphere on the hot, sunny side of a planet is pushed away from the colder side, is one of the most complete explanations for Venus retrograde and planetary collisions.

Nicholas Finn

I've been the captain of a fishing boat for over 20 years, and I created Pirateering to share my knowledge of and interest in seafaring.

Recent Posts