The eight planets of the solar system occupy space with their own distinct personalities. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shared a video on the 14th that lets viewers compare each planet's rotation at a glance.
Produced using NASA imagery, the video lines up every planet in the solar system—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—and presents their rotations in an animated sequence, visually showing each planet's spin.
In this time-lapse video, one Earth day—that is, one full rotation of Earth—passes in just a few seconds. Jupiter rotates at the fastest rate. Venus has the slowest rotation and spins in the opposite direction. It is thought that the rocky planets found in the inner solar system underwent dramatic changes in their axes of rotation during the intense collisions of the early solar system.
Research into the fundamental reasons each planet came to have its particular rotational behavior and tilt remains active. NASA said modern computer modeling and the recent discovery and analysis of hundreds of exoplanets (planets orbiting other star systems) are providing valuable insights for this work. Meanwhile, with the exception of Earth, the English names of the other solar system planets are derived from the names of gods in Roman and Greek mythology.