Amazing Fact: A Day on Venus Is Longer Than Its Year
Venus rotates so slowly that one full spin takes longer than one trip around the Sun. This is not metaphor. Space is just like that.
WHY IS THIS IN THE FILE?
Nobody took responsibility quickly enough.
Venus takes about 243 Earth days to rotate once on its axis. It takes only about 225 Earth days to complete an orbit around the Sun.
So the ordinary sentence ‘a day is longer than a year’ is literally true there, provided by day you mean one full rotation.
Venus also rotates in the opposite direction from most planets in the solar system. If you could stand there without being crushed, baked, and chemically insulted by the atmosphere, the Sun would appear to rise in the west and set in the east.
The solar day — sunrise to sunrise — is about 117 Earth days, because Venus is rotating while also moving around the Sun. Space has several definitions of ‘day’ because apparently calendars were not already irritating enough.
Source: NASA Science: Venus Facts.
Mina Foss
Keeper of Amazing Facts: real science, history, engineering, animals, and other true things too strange to leave to fake-news accounts.
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