If the same side of a particular planet facing the sun or a central object, that means its rotating genius.

Yea, which i admitted when i said it was rotating around its parent star...

But this is completely different from the rotation being talked of (rotation about its own central axis). The planet i speak of does not rotate around its own central axis, but rotates around the sun. The Earth, however, rotates about its own axis as well as the sun.

The other guy was implying all planets were rotating about their own axis... which is incorrect.

This post was edited by unghghgh on Apr 21 2009 09:05pm

*sigh*.. okay, take a die and pick a side (lets say 6). Now take anything else, put it somewhere and take your die and rotate it around that object while the 6 is facing towards the center. If you notice, you can't have the 6 facing the center ALL the time without TURNING the die on its axis...

All planets rotate on their axis my friend.

They rotate because the 4th dimension, as they like to call it, which is the time and space, is basically pressed by the extreme mass of the sun.

To reproduce this, ask your girlfriend or mom or someone to hold a blanket in the air, straight, all flat.

Ask someone else to put something like a basketball on the blanket. See what happens? The basketball digs in the blanket.

Same with the sun and the time and space.

Now, when you know this, why the planets rotate is because they are falling in that 'hole' made by the sun, but are trying to get out.

They are balanced enough to be right in the middle, and they end up rotating.

You know those machines for kids where you make a penny roll and roll and then it always ends up falling in the hole in the middle, and you lose your penny?

The planets are like the penny, the sun is the hole, only the planets have found the perfect balance between falling and getting out of that.

The basic reason why the planets revolve around, or orbit the sun (rotate actually is used to describe their spin, for example, the Earth completes one rotation about its axis every 24 hours, but it completes one revolution around the Sun every 365 days), is that the gravity of the Sun keeps them in their orbits. Just as the Moon orbits the Earth because of the pull of Earth's gravity, the Earth orbits the Sun because of the pull of the Sun's gravity


sources:
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=416

the question is regarding their rotation (spin on its axis), not revolution ....

This post was edited by Duress_x on Apr 22 2009 07:28am

big fat f'ing fail. first off the fact that particles spin is a fairly new discovery. second, no no one knows how gravity works.


ill give you the basics of it. dark matter was dreamed up after discovery of the the rotation curve of a galaxy. -some unknown force was holding everything in place, there was not enough matter to keep the galaxy in tact by gravity as we know it. but recent experiments and phonomena (voyager craft) have suggested gravity reacts differently (stronger) at great distances and that newtonian physics does not apply outside of a solar system -or just needs to be tweaked. (newtonian physics works perfect inside our solar system). this also help explain how a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy can hold a star at its rim, some 50,000 light years away. this "tweaking" of universal gravitational theory would be very very slight, but over such amazingly large distances makes a collosal difference. this theory is called MOND modified newtonian dynamics.

next you will say "explain hubbles constant" (the distance between galaxies appears to be increasing at a rate of 70km per second over a distance of 3 million light years) -well, the possibility is that light itself is effected by stronger gravitational pull when it leaves a system -not that space is inflating at all. enough for now ill post link when i make thread.

no i dont necessarily believe this, it is very interesting. scources are 13 things that dont make sense-by michael brooks -great read and march 09 issue of astronomy monthly.

This post was edited by juliusjuice on Apr 22 2009 01:23pm

lol thanks =P

made my day

This post was edited by Mr_Bilson on Apr 23 2009 10:44pm

This is a satisfying explanation for me.