Venus Spins Backwards Slower Than It Orbits

Venus rotates so slowly on its axis that it takes 243 Earth days to complete one spin, yet it orbits the sun in just 225 days. This means a single day on Venus is actually longer than a Venusian year. Even stranger, Venus rotates backward compared to most planets, a quirk scientists attribute to a massive collision early in the solar system's history. The planet's thick atmosphere moves much faster than its surface, with winds reaching 360 kilometers per hour in the upper atmosphere while the ground crawls along at a glacial pace. If you stood on Venus and watched the sun, it would rise in the west and set in the east, the opposite of what we experience on Earth. This retrograde rotation, combined with the planet's extreme atmospheric conditions and surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead, makes Venus one of the most inhospitable and peculiar worlds in our solar system, despite being similar in size to Earth.