Solved cryptogram
Venus turns backward compared with the other planets, so there the sun would rise in the west.
Astronomy Facts, sourced to NASA.
What it means
Almost everything in the solar system spins the same way, inherited from the rotation of the cloud it all condensed out of. Venus does not, and nobody is certain why. A giant impact early on could have flipped it, or tidal forces acting on its thick atmosphere could have slowly turned it over. Its rotation is also extraordinarily slow, taking longer than its trip around the sun.
The claim comes from NASA, and the page it comes from was read on 2026-08-27 to confirm it still says this.
This is not the kind of claim that goes out of date, which is why it was set as a puzzle rather than a fact with a shelf life.
Solve it yourself
This fact is a cryptogram here: 76 letters over 19 different ones, graded medium.
- SourceNASA
- CollectionAstronomy Facts
- Difficultymedium
- Length76 letters, 19 of them different
Nearby in the collection
The facts either side of this one.
About as hard as this one
Scored closest to it by the model behind our guide to solving cryptograms.