Venus: The Solar System's Backward Spinner

Among the eight planets tracing their ancient paths around the Sun, Venus alone has chosen—or been compelled—to turn against the current. Spinning east to west while its neighbors move west to east, Venus completes a single rotation in 243 Earth days, longer than its own year, a paradox written in the physics of its suffocating atmosphere and the patient gravity of the Sun. Scientists believe that over billions of years, Venus's extraordinarily dense atmospheric envelope became a lever in the hands of solar gravity, slowly reversing the planet's spin entirely. Venus reminds us that even worlds