Did you know that planets could be tidally locked to the sun?

Tidally locked Earth | When a day was longer than a year #nasa #mars #water #space #mercury #venus #planet

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Bet no one has ever told you that the Earth was once tidally locked to the sun. This means that a long time ago, one side of the Earth experienced perpetual day and the other side perpetual night. Most people don't know that the Sun rotates on its axis once every 27 days. Earth takes 24 hours to spin once, and Mars takes 25 hours. The gas giants actually spin the fastest. To spin once, Jupiter takes just 10 hours, Saturn takes 11 hours, Uranus takes 17 hours, and Neptune takes 16 hours. Venus and Mercury actually spin the slowest, with 243 Earth days and 58 Earth days respectively. This is counterintuitive, because if larger objects spin faster, then the sun is by far the largest object in the solar system. What most people don't realize is that the planets closest to the sun had great difficulty in overcoming their initial tidal locking, to attain rotational motion in the first place; whereas, the planets further away from the sun's gravitational influence had a much easier task in attaining and preserving rotational inertia. Mercury's solar year (or one lap around the Sun) is about 88 Earth-days long, but a solar day on Mercury is actually twice as long as its year, or about 176 Earth-days long. This is because of the slow rotation of Mercury.