Space4 steps
Venus is broken
A rabbit hole is a short chain of facts where each one hands you to the next. Start at the top and see where it leaves you.
- On Venus, the Sun rises in the west.
Venus spins backwards — opposite to its orbit and to nearly every other planet in the Solar System. Stand on its surface and the Sun would rise in the west, and the best…
And that backwards spin does something strange to the calendar…
- A day on Venus is longer than its year. Also shorter. Both.
A single rotation of Venus takes 243 Earth days — longer than its 225-day trip around the Sun. Yet because it spins backwards, sunrise to sunrise works out to only about 117…
Meanwhile, the atmosphere refuses to keep the planet's pace…
- Venus barely spins, but its sky screams at 360 km/h.
The solid body of Venus takes months to rotate, but its upper atmosphere tears around the planet in about four Earth days, with cloud-top winds near 360 km/h. Data from Japan's…
And all that furious air has one more property: it's an oven…
- Mercury is closer to the Sun. Venus is hotter anyway.
Venus is nearly twice as far from the Sun as Mercury, yet its surface is far hotter — around 465°C, day and night, pole to pole. A carbon dioxide atmosphere over 90 times denser…