Explanation:
How does your favorite planet spin?
Does it spin rapidly around a nearly vertical axis, or horizontally, or backwards?
The featured video animates
NASA images of
all eight planets in
our Solar System to show them
spinning side-by-side
for an easy comparison.
In the
time-lapse video,
a day on Earth -- one Earth rotation -- takes just a few seconds.
Jupiter rotates the fastest, while
Venus spins not only the slowest (can you see it?),
but backwards.
The inner rocky planets, across the top, most certainly underwent
dramatic
spin-altering collisions during the early days of the Solar System.
The reasons why planets spin and tilt as they do remains a
topic of research
with much insight gained from modern
computer modeling and the recent discovery and analysis of hundreds of
exoplanets:
planets
orbiting other stars.
