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[AU Spoilers] General Essay Stuffs


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2 minutes ago, Glamdring804 said:

Also, Taldain orbits a blue giant? This definitely confirms my theory that Autonomy has a regulatory effect on the climate of Taldain. Otherwise, the dayside would be a molten wasteland hotter than Mercury. Everything else checks out

...except for the smaller star in a farther orbit that consistently illuminates Darkside.  For that to work, it would have to be orbiting the main star with the same orbital period ("year length") as Taldain, but significantly further out so that the star's radiation doesn't roast everyone.  Problem is, Newton and Einstein both tell us that's impossible, as the period of a stable orbit around a constant gravitational source is directly proportionate to its distance from that gravitational source.

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1 minute ago, Mason Wheeler said:

...except for the smaller star in a farther orbit that consistently illuminates Darkside.  For that to work, it would have to be orbiting the main star with the same orbital period ("year length") as Taldain, but significantly further out so that the star's radiation doesn't roast everyone.  Problem is, Newton and Einstein both tell us that's impossible, as the period of a stable orbit around a constant gravitational source is directly proportionate to its distance from that gravitational source.

My apologies. By "Everything" I meant the systems other than Taldain and Roshar.

Even more complications arise with the moon of Taldain, as tidal forces and conservation would cause the planet to start rotating underneath it, with the boundary between the sides as the equator, and the centers of the day and night sides as the poles.

Edited by Glamdring804
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3 minutes ago, Glamdring804 said:

This all but confirms the theory that the earthquake was a deliberate attack on the Elantrian magic system.

How so?  I don't see anything there to support that theory.

IMO the fatal flaw in the theory is the basic question cui bono?  If Elantris's enemies engineered the earthquake somehow, then who was it that did it?  The obvious culprit for our hypothetical crime is Fjordell, but if so, why did it take them so many years to follow through, when an ideal time to send in the dakhors to wipe everyone out would have been in the chaos immediately following the Fall that they had set up.

And if it wasn't them, then who?

Sometimes an earthquake is just an earthquake.

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2 minutes ago, Mason Wheeler said:

...except for the smaller star in a farther orbit that consistently illuminates Darkside.  For that to work, it would have to be orbiting the main star with the same orbital period ("year length") as Taldain, but significantly further out so that the star's radiation doesn't roast everyone.  Problem is, Newton and Einstein both tell us that's impossible, as the period of a stable orbit around a constant gravitational source is directly proportionate to its distance from that gravitational source.

There's also the problem of the stars' ages. The white dwarf would have to be billions of years old, whilst the blue-white supergiant could be no more than millions of years old. However stars in binary systems form at the same time as each other, so they would have to be the same age as each other.

The way I see it this system would have to have been constructed artificially, this could not have come about naturally.

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4 minutes ago, Mason Wheeler said:

How so?  I don't see anything there to support that theory.

IMO the fatal flaw in the theory is the basic question cui bono?  If Elantris's enemies engineered the earthquake somehow, then who was it that did it?  The obvious culprit for our hypothetical crime is Fjordell, but if so, why did it take them so many years to follow through, when an ideal time to send in the dakhors to wipe everyone out would have been in the chaos immediately following the Fall that they had set up.

And if it wasn't them, then who?

Sometimes an earthquake is just an earthquake.

The Derethi believe that Jaddeth will rise from the earth. It's possible that the planet itself is what's speaking to Wyrn, and it wanted to destroy the Elantrians for some reason.

Not saying I agree with the theory; but it seems the earthquake is related to the planet coming alive, and the Derethi could definitely be listening to the planet.

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1 minute ago, Pagerunner said:

The Derethi believe that Jaddeth will rise from the earth. It's possible that the planet itself is what's speaking to Wyrn, and it wanted to destroy the Elantrians for some reason.

Not saying I agree with the theory; but it seems the earthquake is related to the planet coming alive, and the Derethi could definitely be listening to the planet.

Which brings up another thing I've wondered about for quite a while: with all these gods running around the Cosmere, and all these inhabitants coming up with religions... how is it that only the Terris have ever managed to even come remotely close to the truth about the God(s) of their world?

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There's something else weird about the Taldain system now that I think about it.

In every other system the stars have 16 major stylised rays of light coming from them. In Taldain however, both stars only have 14 stylised rays coming from them. I've no idea why but there must be something significant about this.

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34 minutes ago, Mason Wheeler said:

Which brings up another thing I've wondered about for quite a while: with all these gods running around the Cosmere, and all these inhabitants coming up with religions... how is it that only the Terris have ever managed to even come remotely close to the truth about the God(s) of their world?

I think a certain Worldsinger/Worldbringer/storyteller may have a hand in this ;)

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Eh, I think several hit close to the truth. Austre is not too far off from Endowment. Domi and Jaddeth are two pretty clear stand-ins for Devotion and Dominion. Even the Southern Scadrians are pretty close with their gods as well. It's a bit too early to tell with Roshar, as we don't know much about the early history, but the Almighty is clearly based on Honor, and Jasnah claims that the western people have a goddess that seems similar to Cultivation. The Terris got a lot of things right, but someone has to be the closest.

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Liars of Partinel unpublished work spoiler

Spoiler

Anyone else think the Evil on Threnody is similar to the creeping death in Liars of Partinel? I wonder if Brandon decided to move that out of Liars/Yolen to Threnody. Or if there could be a connection between the two if not?

Reminder: keep the Liars of Partinel stuff in spoiler tags!!!

 

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2 minutes ago, Argel said:

Liars of Partinel unpublished work spoiler

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Anyone else think the Evil on Threnody is similar to the creeping death in Liars of Partinel? I wonder if Brandon decided to move that out of Liars/Yolen to Threnody. Or if there could be a connection between the two if not?

Reminder: keep the Liars of Partinel stuff in spoiler tags!!!

 

Spoiler

It's been a while, but isn't the creeping death the same thing as the fain life? Which she references in the Scadrian essay?

 

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2 hours ago, BlackYeti said:

There's also the problem of the stars' ages. The white dwarf would have to be billions of years old, whilst the blue-white supergiant could be no more than millions of years old. However stars in binary systems form at the same time as each other, so they would have to be the same age as each other.

The way I see it this system would have to have been constructed artificially, this could not have come about naturally.

Sirius is a white dwarf orbiting a blue giant. So this sort of binary system does exist in real life.

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1 hour ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

Sirius is a white dwarf orbiting a blue giant. So this sort of binary system does exist in real life.

I'm afraid that this doesn't invalidate what I said above. A blue giant is not the same thing as a blue-white supergiant, they are completely different types of star, and as the name implies, supergiants are a lot larger than giants. Which is important because the larger a star gets, the shorter it's lifespan, and it doesn't scale down linearly.

What I said earlier was somewhat loose, so let me be a lot more precise. A white dwarf is essentially a dead star, there is no nuclear fusion taking place in it at all. This means that it's already lived through it's main sequence. When I said billions of years I was actually thinking of our own sun, which will become a white dwarf in about 5 billion years time, however for a large enough star it would instead be in the hundreds-of-millions. Given its size, a blue giant on the other hand has a maximum lifespan in the hundreds-of-millions of years. The two stars in the Sirius system are both around 250 million years old, so there is indeed no problem here.

Blue-white supergiants on the other hand have a maximum lifespan of 10 million years and it could be much shorter.

If it helps, here's an graphic to better show the ages, and if you want more detail on the Sirius system you could have a look at this.

Starlives1.gif

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Basically, in the Sirius system, the white dwarf was the larger of the two stars. They were both large bodies, but not so large that they collapse into neutron stars when they exhaust their fuel. If Taldain orbits a blue-white supergiant, then it will definitely form a neutron star, possibly even a black hole when it dies. For the other star of the system to already be dead, it would need to be even more massive. This opens up another possibility, however. Perhaps Khriss is actually mistaken. The other member of Taldain's binary is actually a black hole, and the dust cloud is the outer edge of the accretion disc. The ultraviolet radiation would be from the inner edge of the disc. 

 

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Liars of Partinel spoilers:

2 hours ago, Pagerunner said:
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It's been a while, but isn't the creeping death the same thing as the fain life? Which she references in the Scadrian essay?

It's "creeping darkness" in AU, not "creeping death" so they could be different. And I thought in Liars it left everything white -- not exactly "darkness". But Brandon could have taken the concept from Liars and tweaked it.  The "creeping" part of the names certainly suggests some kind of connection or similarity. Maybe a different manifestation of the same type of magic?

Edited by Argel
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5 hours ago, Glamdring804 said:

Wow. Lots of information to parse through. I'll start with

Ow, the physics is painful.

10 gas giants? Rust and Ruin, our system is barely stable with four!

Our system is very stable (4.6 billion years old and extremely likely to be stable for billions more). We know Shards can move and create planets; stability over the ~10,000 year timespan of the Cosmere is much more forgiving.

Or maybe the system is just very big. Those gas giants could be as far apart as ours, but having the outer one at 100 AU instead of 30 like Neptune.

5 hours ago, BlackYeti said:

There's also the problem of the stars' ages. The white dwarf would have to be billions of years old, whilst the blue-white supergiant could be no more than millions of years old. However stars in binary systems form at the same time as each other, so they would have to be the same age as each other.

The way I see it this system would have to have been constructed artificially, this could not have come about naturally.

It probably is artificial, but what about a pre-existing white dwarf (possibly with planet) being captured into an orbit around the supergiant?

The L1 point between the stars isn't entirely stable, however, so Taldain's position would require some effort to maintain.

 

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16 minutes ago, cometaryorbit said:

It probably is artificial, but what about a pre-existing white dwarf (possibly with planet) being captured into an orbit around the supergiant?

The L1 point between the stars isn't entirely stable, however, so Taldain's position would require some effort to maintain.

Fair point, that is basically the only way these types of stars could exist in a system together, however the probability is quite literally astronomically low.

Fist you need two systems to collide, and this is rare even when galaxies collide with each other given the vast distances between systems. Then one of the stars needs to be a blue-white supergiant, which are also rare. And then they need to end up in this precise orbital pattern.

In short, it's absurd.

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2 minutes ago, BlackYeti said:

Fair point, that is basically the only way these types of stars could exist in a system together, however the probability is quite literally astronomically low.

Fist you need two systems to collide, and this is rare even when galaxies collide with each other given the vast distances between systems. Then one of the stars needs to be a blue-white supergiant, which are also rare. And then they need to end up in this precise orbital pattern.

In short, it's absurd.

Probability in cosmere is probably not something to worry about when you have gods messing with stuff. For all we know Autonomy could just like stars and so he/she/it put a star around a star of the system Autonomy Invested in.

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1 hour ago, WeiryWriter said:

So I actually have asked Peter about this. Brandon is actually talking about Nazh's given name (which I'm guessing is a very Puritan-y name, like Silence), Nazrilof is his surname.

Cool! I bet it's something incredibly embarrassing like Job-rakt-out-of-the-asshes or Flee-fornication. :P

57 minutes ago, Glamdring804 said:

This opens up another possibility, however. Perhaps Khriss is actually mistaken. The other member of Taldain's binary is actually a black hole, and the dust cloud is the outer edge of the accretion disc. The ultraviolet radiation would be from the inner edge of the disc. 

I had the same conclusion as cometaryorbit above, but that is one awesome scenario you've got there!

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