39,327
edits
Weird Sun: Difference between revisions
update links
(rename pun that makes this harder to find (It's funny but I'm waging a war on hard to find indexes)) |
(update links) |
||
Line 7:
Common oddities:
* The Sun appears much larger in the sky than it does in real life.
* Sun in fiction sometimes has visible rays. In real life, sunray-like effect can exist with a phenomenon called Tyndall effect. However, in fiction, rays can be present in various ways:
** They're sector-like and cover the whole sky.
Line 23:
== Advertising ==
* The mascot for Raisin Bran. Two scoops of raisins!
Line 40:
* ''[[Vernor Vinge|A Deepness In The Sky]]'' features a planet orbiting a "On-Off Star", which follows a cycle of going completely dark for decades at a time, forcing the native species to live deep underground and hibernate for this period until a technological civilization could sustain life during the sunless period. Technically, it's not a star at all, and it's implied that the On-Off Star is the work of [[Sufficiently Advanced Aliens]].
* In ''[[Un Lun Dun]]'', the UnSun is shaped like a donut. It's rumored that our sun used to be the center of the UnSun.
* In [[Graham McNeill]]'s [[Warhammer
* Some of the Territories in the [[Pendragon]] series have ''very'' weird suns. One has three suns which rise and set at the same time and overlap each other at midday, another has a rising and setting band of light stretching across the whole sky. No explanation is ever given for how these systems work.
* [[Karl Schroeder]]'s ''Virga'' series takes place in a "world" where there's no gravity, but there is air, and land exists as asteroids. Small "suns" that light regions of fifteen miles or so float freely throughout; one gigantic "Sun of Suns" anchors the whole thing from the center. {{spoiler|The whole world is artificial; the air is kept in by a giant (~3000 mile) balloon-type structure. The suns are fusion reactors.}}
Line 62:
== Newspaper Comics ==
* In ''[[Calvin and Hobbes]]'', Calvin's dad goes to town with this, telling him that [[Little-Known Facts|it's about the size of a quarter, moves by 'solar wind' and lands in Arizona at night which is why the rocks there are all red]].
* In a ''[[The Far Side]]'' strip captioned "Inside the Sun", a guy sits at a desk reading a newspaper, with eight desk fans all blowing at once and two large switches on the wall labeled "rise" and "set", while huge flames roar outside the window.
== Tabletop Games ==
* In the ''[[Dungeons
** The crossover nature of Spelljammer means that Spelljammer's description of suns applies (or applie''d'', at least, given the three editions since then) to most campaign settings, even ones where it would not otherwise come up.
** In the Hollow World, the sun is a pinpoint gateway to the Plane of Fire, and it shut down and left the planet's interior in darkness for a week during the Wrath of the Immortals [[Story Arc]].
Line 113:
* On the ''[[Jumanji]]'' cartoon, the world of Jumanji had a fake sun. It was a small metal sphere hanging in the sky covered in mirrors and fire-shooting holes.
* ''[[The Nightmare Before Christmas]]'': The sun has the face of a jack-o-lantern.
* In ''[[Hercules (
* In lapine folklore of ''[[Watership Down]]'', the sun is Frith, the supreme creator-deity, who'd crafted the world from his droppings. The opening sequence uses a highly-stylized [[Art Shift]] to represent Frith and his surroundings.
* The sun from ''[[Rock-a-Doodle]]'' for some reason changes from a realistic Sun when seen from outer space, to an anthropomorphic sun when seen from Chanticleer's farm. And the sun (whose rising and setting is constantly controlled by Chanticleer) will occasionally go against his rules and rise on its own.
* In ''[[Gargoyles]],'' the eponymous beings face the sun as it rises, and turn to stone as soon at its direct light strikes them. But somehow, they also manage to face the sun when it sets...
* In an episode of ''[[The Angry Beavers]]'', the beavers have been sent on a mission to the sun as disposable lab animals (not explorers, like they originally thought.) After watching a video (conveniently titled, "So You're Spiraling Into the Sun"), they stop the pull of the sun's gravity by creating a dam of space debris, just as they would dam a river.
Line 124:
* A pre-[[Socrates|Socratic]] philosopher named [[Awesome McCoolname|Anaxagoras]] believed that the Sun was not a god, but a large ball of incandescent metal about the size of the Peloponnese. In Athens, this amounted to blasphemy, and he had to leave town in a hurry.
* Planets have been found orbiting pulsars. You're not going to find [http://3dastronomer.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/extreme_planet.jpg a weirder sun to orbit than that].
** Especially weird when you consider the first discovered star system with extrasolar planets ''[[wikipedia:PSR 1257+12|was a pulsar system]]''. They found it in 1992. The first confirmed exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star, [[wikipedia:51 Pegasi b|51 Pegasi b]], was only discovered three years later, in 1995. Though in all honesty, the astronomers who discovered the pulsar system couldn't make a 100% sure statement about it having planets until 2007, when it was finally confirmed it had three exoplanets of its own, formed under unusual circumstances.
** Of course considering the sheer amount of radiation the pulsars emit, the chances of anyone watching them are small.
** And that is an artist's depiction, which took certain liberties with the appearance of a pulsar. For example, those purple magnetic field lines should be invisible, and any orbiting planet's atmosphere would have been blown away by the preceding supernova—so you'd never see an overpowered aurora by being in orbit around a neutron star.
Line 137:
[[Category:Astronomy Tropes]]
[[Category:Artistic License Astronomy]]
[[Category:
| |||