Descriptions are as follows:
- Noun / Adjective pillar (original underlined)
- Name of class
- Damage type
"Message when the pillar is defeated"
Description of the celestial body the pillar is based on (or at least, my interpretation).
"You are overwhelmed with pain..."
Our sun is a white, average-sized, middle-aged star that is unique only because it does not have a companion and has a lot of junk surrounding it. Like a League of Legends player! (rimshot) Like most stars, the sun is a sphere of really hot plasma, and it produces energy mostly by turning hydrogen into helium using nuclear fusion. Even though humanity has always thought of the sun as being yellow or orange, it's actually white, making the sun more like an office building's fluorescent lighting than fire. Ah forget this, the real sun is boring. The sun as our forefathers saw it is a gleaming, flaming place of splendid heat and glory, where Ra sits upon his throne of fire, Khepri defies death each dawn, Apollo plays his lyre melodically for all to enjoy, Amaterasu inspires a legacy of emperors, Tonatiuh captures the lifeforce offered in human sacrifices, and the secret to turning lead to gold is just within reach. Laudato Solis!
"Your muscles ache with exhaustion..."
Mercury is a sterile place, with the almost complete lack of an atmosphere causing temperatures to fluctuate from −173°C (−280°F) at night to 427°C (800°F). On Mercury, all water freezes solid in an instant in the shade, and even metal begins to melt in the sun. There is no rest from these infernal temperatures, no cooling breeze; there is hardly any air at all. Due to billions of years of geological inactivity, the surface closely resembles that of the moon, featuring a multitude of impact craters from meteor showers, volcanoes that have lied dead for billions of years, and endless, rolling plains. Mercury is a solid mass of rock, with a huge metal core, which never strays far from the sun. Mercury is named after the Roman messenger of the gods, who was believed to be an embodiment of speed and athleticism (among other things).
"A pressure on your chest makes it hard to breathe..."
A gas giant is a huge planet made of gas, like Neptune or Jupiter. This pillar is, more specifically a rogue planet with a bottomless ocean. A rogue planet is a planet that orbits the galaxy's center directly, orphaned from its solar system. Even though they don't have stars to keep them warm, they can still have liquid water oceans if their atmospheres are thick enough, thanks to geothermal energy. The core of a gas giant is a strange type of "hot ice" that is hot enough to boil but stays solid because of the immense pressure of the weight of the material above it. These planets could harbor a multitude of unimaginably strange aquatic life, which would be accustomed to the pull of much stronger gravity.
"Otherworldly voices linger around you..."
When a star of an extremely large size finally collapses, it creates an incredibly huge explosion called a supernova, releasing all the elements that were formed within it during fusion, and the force of the detonation also continues fusion, producing elements that are only possible to make in these special conditions. What is left is a cloud of glittering metals and other elements, drifting off into the emptiness of space, where they will someday amass again, creating a new solar system. From the new solar system will form new planets and moons, perhaps even new life. The world at times might seem large and uncaring, but remember that we are all made of stardust.
"Your thoughts seem like they are not yours..."
A pulsar is a white dwarf or neutron star that emits beams of radiation from its poles and spins incredibly fast. They are so dense that an entire ton of the matter that one of these is made of would be the size of a thimble. They're called pulsars because, when observed from Earth, they seem to "pulse", becoming seemingly brighter when their rapid rotation has either end of the beam pointed towards us, like a lighthouse. There is a special type of pulsar called a magnetar that has a magnetic field so strong that it could suck the iron out of your blood. When first discovered, the pulsing phenomenon was nicknamed LGM, "little green men", because it seemed as though extraterrestrials were trying to communicate.
"You nearly succumb to panic..."
A quasar is an active galactic nucleus that is overwhelmingly bright. It consists of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, like the one I just mentioned, and the large disc of gas that it's constantly devouring. Quasars are some of the most energetic objects in the known universe, capable of emitting up to a thousand times as much electromagnetic energy (from x-rays to gamma-rays) as the entire Milky Way galaxy, which contains hundreds of billions of stars. Since they are a type of black hole, the functioning part of the quasar (the area within the black hole's event horizon, which nothing can escape, not even light) is itself invisible. The huge amount of energy is actually produced by the friction of material that is about to be devoured. These fearsome behemoths are known only by the deaths of their victims.
"Your hands are shaking..."
A nova (commonly confused with a supernova) is an interaction between two stars that are close together that makes a huge flash of light that can persist for multiple months. It usually happens with two stars that orbit each other, one of which is a white dwarf and the other of which isn't, when the white dwarf absorbs a ton of the other star's gas, making a dense but thin atmosphere. The atmosphere heats up a ton because white dwarves are extremely hot, and it eventually gets so hot it explodes like a nuclear bomb (more specifically, it explodes because of runaway hydrogen fusion). The energy of this huge explosion shoots the flaming gas out into space, giving the appearance of a new star having appeared out of nowhere, several times brighter than the two stars combined.
"Your teeth are chattering..."
Terraria is kind of vague on what exactly this is supposed to be but it features bright spirals, so I'm going to assume it's a white hole. A white hole is the theoretical opposite of a black hole, believed to exist simply because all that matter has to go somewhere, even though none have ever been proven to exist (though GRB 060614 has been hypothesized to have been one). Like any other mass, white holes attract matter which forms a disk as it spirals inwards, but unlike other mass, they have an event horizon that is impossible to enter from the outside.
"You can't quite tell where anything is..."
A tesseract is to a cube as a cube is to a square. Since we occupy a three-dimensional space, we can fold a net of 2D squares into a 3D cube. If we could move through the fourth dimension, we could fold a net of 3D cubes into a 4D tesseract. From the point of view of a three-dimensional being navigating the inside of a tesseract, space would seem to loop in on itself. Looking far enough behind your back, you could see yourself turning around to look at yourself turning around to look at yourself turning around to look at yourself. You could run towards the horizon, only to see it get further and further away, but also creeping up behind you.
"A strange melody is repeating in your head..."
"Shooting star" is a misnomer. What we call "shooting stars" are actually meteors burning up in our atmosphere, not stars, and meteors are nothing new to Terraria. A real "shooting" star would be a hypervelocity star. Hypervelocity stars hurtle through space at around 1,000m/s (2,000,000 mph), and are stars that were part of a binary system (that is, a pair of stars) until the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy consumed one, ejecting the other into the far reaches of space. Thanks to the sacrifice of their life-long partners, these stars escaped death and gained the speed to travel to other galaxies.
"Your mind goes numb..."
A nebula is a cloud of gas and dust in space. In relatively young galaxies, the space in between stars is permeated by a very thin medium of gas and dust. In areas very far away from the gravitational influence of stars, the gas and dust clumps together, becoming a sort of cloud called a nebula. Within parts these nebulas, the gas gets thick enough to start swirling and clumping together even more, until it makes a clump so dense and heavy that it ignites and starts fusing hydrogen to make helium, becoming a new star. Nebulas are dark and block the stars behind them from our view, but the stars forming within them can cause parts of the nebulas surrounding them to glow. Nebulas where a lot of stars are forming are sometimes called "stellar nurseries".
"There are spots lingering in your vision..."
A comet is a type of asteroid that originates from the far reaches of the solar system, further away than Neptune. Comets are made of rock and ice, with pockets of frozen gas, and when they get close enough to the sun, its heat melts the gas and ice, releasing the gas along with a large amount of dust. The gas and ice form two visible tails as they stream out of the comet, which can sometimes be visible from Earth.
"Your feel like you're being pulled away..."
This is another vague one. My interpretation of it is that it's a cluster of stars, more specifically, The Pleiades Star Cluster. The Pleiades Star Cluster is one of the brightest objects in our sky. The cluster is a group of stars containing over a thousand members, fourteen of which can be seen with the naked eye. The name is Greek in origin, and is thought by some to come from peleiades, meaning "flock of doves". It's as if the stars are a community, living together in harmony.
"You feel sick and feverish..."
Ordinary stars operate by fusing hydrogen atoms into helium. When a large enough star has run out of hydrogen at its core, it starts fusing hydrogen in a thick shell around the core, which is now helium. This makes the core larger and larger, until it reaches a point where it begins to heat and shrink, while the outer layers expand and cool making the star look red and absolutely enormous (even for a star). The star is now going a few steps further than it used to, fusing helium into carbon and oxygen, carbon into neon, and lastly, neon into iron. Stars cannot produce enough energy to fuse iron, not even these behemoths. After using up all their neon, they collapse in on themselves, now that the force of their produced energy is no longer there to counteract the force of their own gravity. After reaching a very small size, the collapse violently rebounds in an explosion called a supernova.
Credit to Sacred Tools for Quasar, Tremor for Nova, Thorium for Celestial and Shooting Star, Expanded Sentries for Sentry, Battle Rods for Fishing, and Greenteacake for Hermetic and Acrobatic.