![]() ![]() The writers of Decoded (and 99% of all novels, comics, and spinoff products) are going to use "real" figures because that's what they know - therefore the sane solution is to make all in-universe figures from the GFFA the same as ours.įrom an in-universe perspective, I guess this makes it closest to your third solution, namely that parsecs are either arbitrary or based on some other planet's measurements. You really hit on the problem when you reference the Decoded episode below. don't have a basis in the GFFA but we keep using them anyway. If you think about it, the meter is one ten-millionth of the distance from Earth's equator to the North Pole, so technically the meter, kilometer, etc. Turns out it doesn't, but we're still going to use real world references to avoid the need to make conversion calculations every time we provide a specific bit of data. Therefore, I'd be happiest if it turned out that Coruscant had a 24-hour rotation cycle and a 365-day orbital period, and an AU that is 149,597,870,691 meters. So, while it's true that West End Games introduced a ten-month calendar, I personally will never use it, and Lucasfilm basically uses a 12-month calendar anyway. This is both for the sake of our sanity and for the sake of making the universe something readers can relate to. I think our approach to units of timekeeping is to try to make them as equivalent to "real world" units of timekeeping as possible. Here is an excerpt from his reply, from 2009 (emphasis added): I asked whether A) in-universe light-years were longer than ours, B) Coruscant years were the same length as ours (and just had shorter days), or C) in-universe light-years and parsecs were the same length as ours and just arbitrarily defined. I noticed that this seemed like a discrepancy, since a light-year with a longer year would be a different length than real-world light years (even assuming Coruscant otherwise had the same orbit as Earth for the purposes of parallax), so I emailed Daniel Wallace, the author of The Essential Atlas, in order to ask which values were being used. Star Wars: The Essential Atlas (2009) mentions this, as well as confirming that Star Wars parsecs are 3.26 light-years long, the same as Earth parsecs. In the Legends continuity, Coruscant's year (and by extension a standard year) is 368 24-hour days long, not 365. Legends answer*: Parsecs aren't parallax-seconds, but are (somehow) the same length as real-world parsecs If we assume they meant 155 million kilometers (instead of miles), this distances would be only a few percent difference from the distance from the Earth to the Sun and would give us a parallax calculation that was almost identical. ![]() Obviously this presents a canon discontinuity, but not a large one, and easily explained by a writing error in the Complete Locations book. That being the case, and given that we know that Coruscant's rotational period is 24 hours (giving us the concept of seconds of arc), one PARallex SECond of arc would be a simple matter of calculation and would be similar to an Earth parsec, albeit not identical, probably about 30% larger. Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, Updated and Expanded The orbital period of Coruscant is 128-155 million miles, a fast elliptical orbit of roughly 1.3 - 1.6AU (as compared to Earth's 93 million miles - 1AU).Ĭoruscant orbits relatively far from its small sun, varying from 207 million to 251 million km (128 million to 155 million miles) Parsecs, along with most other measurements of space and time in Star Wars most likely derive from Coruscant, the cradle of human civilisation and earliest explorers of the Galaxy. So, as Star Wars happens in a galaxy far far away, why are they using the average distance between Earth and the Sun as a distance of measure and how do they know it? It is also a fundamental component in the definition of another unit of astronomical length, the parsec. The astronomical unit is used primarily for measuring distances within the Solar System or around other stars. ![]() Originally conceived as the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion, since 2012 it has been defined as exactly 1.495978707×10 11 m. However, that distance varies as Earth orbits the Sun, from a maximum (aphelion) to a minimum (perihelion) and back again once a year. The astronomical unit (symbol: au, ua, or AU) is a unit of length, roughly the distance from Earth to the Sun and equal to about 150 million kilometres (93 million miles). 1/3600th of a degree.įrom Wikipedia Article on Astronomical Unit: A parsec is obtained by the use of parallax and trigonometry, and is defined as the distance at which one astronomical unit subtends an angle of one arcsecond, i.e. The parsec (symbol: pc) is a unit of length used to measure the large distances to astronomical objects outside the Solar System. ![]()
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