Yes. The only things that rotate or revolve backwards in the Solar system are Venus’s, Uranus’s and Pluto’s rotation; Triton, a moon of Neptune; and several of the smaller Jovian satellites. The latter are just captured asteroids and the mechanism of their capture is no doubt responsible for the retrograde motion.
Oh yes, I forgot. Long period comets have orbits that are essentially random in inclination. Long term means having a period more than 200 years. These comets are from the Oort Cloud which is so far out that it didn’t collapse into a disk like the rest of the solar system. Chances of long period comets are about 50% to be retrograde.
Venus also has the interesting property that its crust–at the last best estimates–seems to be about 700 million years old, a few billion years younger than the rest of the planet.
The idea: Every several hundred million years or so–the interior of Venus heats up so much that it melts the entire crust, which then disappears back into the molten goo.
The crust then cools off and re-solidifies.
And the retrograde rotation is caused by tidal drag on the atmosphere, as earlier posited.
I personally get the idea that when these theories came up, the scientists were probably saying “Yeah! Yeah! That’s the ticket!”
To the scientific community, cosmic cue-balling a few (hundred million) years back–similar to that that gave creation to the earth-moon system)–is dogmatically taboo, since that might dredge up the ineffable “V” word (admittedly, though, a theorist who would have been off by a number of decimal places anyway, even if correct).
Or, since we’ve yet to actually find and confirm the Oort Cloud theory, maybe a spherical shape surrounding our solar system is a very safe, virtually universal, assumption for the model! - Jinx
