I’m writing a work where characters are on a fictional planet not in our solar system. I wanted to refer to the planet’s star/source of light as “the sun” still, but is that correct? Is the sun as we know it the only “sun”, or is sun simply a word to describe our source of light?
In: Planetary Science
Yes, that’s totally fine. “Sun” is typically used to mean the closest star(s) from the perspective of the planet. For instance, Tatooine’s twin suns.
This works the same was as moon, where we call our moon “the moon” but also acknowledge that other planets have multiple moons.
If you want to distinguish our sun/moon/planet from the primary sun/moon/planet of an alien species, we often use the Latin versions (Sol/Luna/Terra) to refer to these specific bodies.
Regarding alien languages, I always imagine that the foreign language is being translated to English. So since “sun” is the word we use to refer to “the primary light source of our planet,” it makes sense that the word they use for that would also be translated as “sun.”
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