Science News - USA (2022-06-04)

URANUS

17 hours, 14 minutes

Uranus rotates

90 degrees off from

everything else, like a

bead rolled along the

ground, instead of

spinning vertically.

MERCURY

58 days, 15 hours,

30 minutes

VENUS

243 days,

26 minutes

Venus spins

clockwise. As far

as we can tell, this

means Venus is

upside down.

EARTH

24 hours

MARS

24 hours,

40 minutes

JUPITER

9 hours,

55 minutes

SATURN

10 hours,

36 minutes

NEPTUNE

16 hours,

6 minutes

Do all planets spin the same way?

Explore more of the universe’s biggest questions in Astroquizzical:

Solving the Cosmic Puzzles of Our Planets, Stars, and Galaxies by

Jillian Scudder. Available now from the MIT Press.

In our solar system, all the major planets are spinning around their

own internal axis. The diagram below shows each planet’s direction

of rotation, and the time it takes to make one complete rotation. If

you think of the planets’ orbits around the Sun as a flat surface, most

planets spin as like a coin on its edge, flicked counterclockwise.

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