Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

KmartQuality t1_iy0uzll wrote

Reply to comment by felixrocket7835 in You see more suns at night than in the daytime. by ParticleDetector

Whatever planet you ate orbiting is "the sun".

If you find yourself in interstellar space or around another star you could refer to the sun as "my sun/star" or "our sun/star".

−9

felixrocket7835 t1_iy0wk2c wrote

I have never heard that definition in my life, well, except on WalesOnline.. hardly a good source.

The Sun is the name of our star, the reason people use sun for stars is due to a misconception, thinking that sun is simply a synonym for stars.

Most dictionaries define the Sun as the star which the earth orbits.

4

KmartQuality t1_iy0xcnk wrote

It's has never been uttered realistically that way because nobody has ever been close to another star.

But it makes perfect sense in science fiction

1

ParticleDetector OP t1_iy2b13c wrote

Since we aren’t talking about the Sun (proper noun version), are you talking about using ‘sun’ (the common noun version) as a replacement for any star, even though it’s not orbited by planets?

If so then yeah that’s it’s weird.

But isn’t ‘sun’ (as a common noun) already being used for a rather long time to describe stars with planets, in popular works, and have such characters in such works mention is as the ‘sun’ (common noun) of that planet etc?

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone here yet say that ‘sun’ is a straight synonym for ‘star’, especially lonely stars with nothing orbiting it.

Like, if you see binary stars and nothing else in that system, we don’t call those ‘suns’ right?

I think you assumed that I was using ‘sun’ as a synonym for every single star?

0