the earth turns counterclockwise, why; how does the earth revolve around the sun (viewed from above)? do all planets/stars etc revolve around their sun in the same direction? what determines the direction of rotation?

Answer

The question could also have been, “Why do the hands of the clock turn in the opposite direction to the Earth?” And even that question is ambiguous: The Earth rotates counterclockwise if we define the sense of the axis of rotation toward the North Pole, not the South Pole. So there’s a bit of cultural colonialism in that.

What matters is not so much in which direction something turns, but that it turns. And that usually has to do with the law called the ‘law of conservation of torque’: when something contracts, it spins faster, when something expands, it spins slower. It also has to do with the fact that most of the large structures in the universe owe their origin to the gravitational force, which tends to bring things together.

Galaxies, stars, planetary systems, it always starts with a larger cloud that contracts. In stars with their planetary systems, this contraction takes place over many orders of magnitude: a gigantic cloud – size: the typical distance between stars – contracts into a sphere. It is then inevitable that the end product turns quickly: for it not to have that, it must have started from a perfect standstill, and that does not exist. The sum of all rotational movements in the cloud is never completely zero, and that small sum is greatly magnified during the contraction. So where the mean axis of rotation points is very haphazard. And that also fits with what we observe: stars rotate in all directions. The planets form in a disk that rotates in the equatorial plane of the star, and their directions of movement and rotation are therefore often more or less parallel to the rotation of the parent star.

Stars and planets are born with rather large rotational speeds. During their evolution they can lose rotational energy (mainly due to tidal forces and magnetic effects) and thus slow down. Again, there is no such thing as complete standstill: we know stars and planets that rotate very slowly, but stand still, not that. The fastest stars rotate on their axis in about half a day, but there are also some for which periods of the order of a hundred years are found.