What would happen if planets didn't rotate?

Answer 1

Well this isn't a very hard question to answer. The Earth is spinning rapidly, now how fast? I'm highly unsure of, let's make a guess say, 16,000MPh-32,000MPh giver take. If the earth were to stop it's rotational orbit around the sun lots of different possibilities could happen.

If the Earth stopped slowly "in it's spinning rotation on it's axis for say" one side of the earth would become frozen to the cruel dark coldness of space, as the other side would become boiling balls hot. Which would make it unmanageable to live. Take one hand you'll boil or burn to death, or freeze it's a lose lose really.

Now if the Earth came to a screaching hault, and stopped on a dime it would have a semi truck effect with a trailer for say. Pretend the truck is the suns gravitational rotation pull which is draging us around. And a deer comes out in front of the truck as it's going 70MPh-90MPh and tryed to make an instent stop. The trailer, "Earth" would start violently moving left to right trying to keep up and everything in it will be violently throwen left to right, up and down, and other directions those boxes and items, "boxes being land, items being living creatures" would be deystroyed and the trailer would detach from the truck "the rotational pull" and go sliding else where.

Now hopefully ones of these options won't happen and it seems logical to me. But I hope this made sense and answered your question.

Answer 2

If planets did not rotate, one side would always face the sun resulting in extreme temperature differences between the sunlit side and the dark side. This would likely lead to significant weather patterns and potentially make one side uninhabitable while the other side frozen. The lack of rotation would also affect the magnetic field generation and day-night cycle.