From what I just read, Venus spins clockwise while the other planets spin counterclockwise. Why is this?
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The vast distances between the bodies in our solar system and other solar systems is so incredibly LARGE that it is statistically impossible for a mass from another system to have passed by and had their gravitational field interfere with Venus’s field (which would affect its movement).
That fact, plus the fact that the planets all orbit the sun on roughly the same plane (the ecliptic), suggest that all bodies in our solar system erupted from the sun, or from one of the other bodies that erupted from the sun. There are several exceptions to the “order” of planetary movements.
Venus rotates in the “wrong” direction, but more importantly it rotates so slowly that it takes 225 Earth-days to make one Venus day.
Uranus spins on it’s side. For lack of a better phrase, imagine that its north pole points at the sun at one point, as it orbits the sun.
[https://earthsky.org/upl/2021/11/Uranus-orbit-Showalter.jpeg](https://earthsky.org/upl/2021/11/Uranus-orbit-Showalter.jpeg)
Pluto is now a “Dwarf” planet as a linguistic compromise. However its orbit of the sun is at a slight angle off from the ecliptic. It doesn’t have much mass, and it’s so far away from the sun, I imagine it’s barely hanging on to staying in our system. I’m sure someday it will drift far enough away to escape the sun’s gravity, and drift off into space.
[https://astrobites.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/nh-line-of-nodes-anne-verbiscer.png](https://astrobites.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/nh-line-of-nodes-anne-verbiscer.png)
Imagine early in the suns birth, it was unstable and frequently flung out spinning masses. I suppose in this scenario that the majority of flung masses simply went off into space, if their trajectory was steep enough.
Then imagine that occasionally a lot of masses were flung out at a shallow angle, and they were pulled back into the sun, being reabsorbed.
Then we come to the middle example. Occasionally a mass was flung out and due to the angle of ejection, speed of ejection, and it’s mass…it achieved the happy accident of landing at a distance that allowed it to fall into a reasonably stable orbit. Most likely the earliest surviving planets were the big ones, Jupiter and Saturn.
They have enough mass that they have significant gravitational fields. These planetary gravitational fields have had a shepherding effect on the smaller planets. They may have played a part in ejected masses becoming one of the smaller planets.
The evidence clearly shows that our solar system has a history of violence. The Earth has a weather cycle that erodes the sharpness of the edges of impact craters, but the moon provides a crisp picture of the type of impacts that happen in the Earth/moon’s neighborhood.
The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter seems like it might have been a proto-planet that was torn apart. I think that theory is as good as any.
[https://useruploads.socratic.org/v9FG4VWRaKRw8ViSJImG_30711ab6b5198f872c29a3d0aaef0761.jpg](https://useruploads.socratic.org/v9FG4VWRaKRw8ViSJImG_30711ab6b5198f872c29a3d0aaef0761.jpg)
As much as it’s understandable that few people would initially believe that a planet-sized body would pass near another planet, due to the incredible distances between them, the planets (and the “flung masses that would become planets”) are all possessing gravitational fields that can influence the direction of a large mass.
I believe Venus was spinning at near the rotational speed of Earth/Mars (early in its life), and some near-pass of a large body affected it’s movement. I also believe the same thing happened to Uranus and Pluto. Not a direct strike, but close enough for the electro-magnetic field of one mass to affect the electromagnetic field of the other. The planets have gravity, and they also have a magnetic field.
[https://physics.aps.org/assets/3a10123d-35b1-4d88-8dc9-549ad83db2b1/e91_1.png](https://physics.aps.org/assets/3a10123d-35b1-4d88-8dc9-549ad83db2b1/e91_1.png)
Alpha Centauri is 4-1/2 light years away. The rest of the systems are farther away. Whatever did this was at one time inside our system.
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