Difference between revisions of "The Suns of Erasan"

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The Suns of Erasan is a book by Solixtus Ar-Zilaran. It can be found in the Royal Library in Empo Sar and the library in Mirai.

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The Suns of Erasan
by Solixtus Ar-Zilaran

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The Suns of Erasan 

The nature of the world of Erasan and the star systems around it has long eluded even the wisest of scholars. It is thought that much of this knowledge was known before the war of shadows and that it was lost during those many terrible years. Once the war ended, theories about the nature of our star system regularly came into and went from favour. In some cases, we had to ask upon the gods of our world to clarify them; although deity visits were brief and few, so we were rarely able to talk about the stars and planets around us. Only fairly recently have we really been able to build up a comprehensive model. 

Judging from ancient scripts, one of the first great questions to have been answered was that of the nature of the land upon which we stand. For some time it was even believed, unequivocally, that the land was in the shape of a sphere, and that we span about a single sun in an orbit! Quite ridiculous! However it is only relatively recently, following voyages across the seas to the edge, that this theory was firmly disproved. 

During my younger years in Leithe Falum, I was heavily involved in researching the planetary and star systems around us. I admit, grudgingly, how I was one of many who tirelessly argued that there was only one sun, the sun that we orbited, and that to believe otherwise was folly and foolish. It seemed to me, and I 

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know I said it on many occasions, that one had only to look at the sky and the movement of the sun to realise this! Some years afterwards, following multiple reports from voyages to the edge, along with the words of several gods, we were eventually convinced otherwise. And now I feel somewhat of a fool myself for my reasoning, as I can't help wondering. What *would* we have expected it to look like, if we and our small sun did in fact orbit a second, much larger sun?! 

As it turns out, we orbit a huge but fairly cool sun in such a way that the surface of our world faces away from it. The more familiar and much smaller second sun is hotter than the first and it too orbits the larger sun, with a much greater and wider path, or ellipse. This ellipse is in effect a double orbit; as by some incredible work I can only attribute to the Creators, it orbits both the colder sun and Erasan. I myself postulated that the hot sun would circle around Erasan much slower than it would the cold sun because the gravitational pull would be so much less. Critics of this model suggested that the hot sun would be too far away and blocked by the colder sun during the night. However the cold sun is still warm enough to provide some heat, and it has been shown that Erasan in fact moves closer to the cold sun during the night as a result of the combined gravitational pull of both suns; as the hot sun rises again, it pulls Erasan back up and away from the cold sun. So Erasan bobs up and down above the cold sun according to the position of the 

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hot sun.

Importantly, Erasan itself also spins about an axis, otherwise the small sun's impact on Erasan would be very similar all across the surface. In fact Erasan spins in such a way that the northern edge is almost always further away from the smaller sun than the southern edge. This causes the southern regions to be hot, the northern regions to be cold and the lands in between to be temperate.