Part 18

Recitation of the Holy Scripture.

Indeed, your Lord is God, who created the heavens and the earth in six days and then established Himself above the Throne, arranging the matter of His creation. Then will you not remember? 

He begins the creation and then repeats it. It is He who made the sun a shining light and the moon a derived light and determined for it phases. God has not created this except in truth. Thus He details the signs for a people who know.

Indeed, in the alternation of the night and the day and in what God has created in the heavens and the earth are signs for a people who fear God.

End of Recitation of the Holy Scripture.

O people as I told you that these few programs are just to give you an idea of the various things various creation of your Lord around you and within yourselves and that this will also help you later to understand the religious scriptures in a better way. Now I will introduce you to few other celestial bodies and phenomena happening in this Universe but before that let me tell you something about the language of God. If you ask me what the language of God is, I will tell you that it’s not Hebrew, it’s not Greek, it’s not Sanskrit nor it is Arabic, but it is Mathematics. Mathematics is the language of the universe. If you go to France you learn French to speak to the people there if you go to Italy you have to learn Italian, same if you want to communicate to the universe you have to learn mathematics this is the reason why math is so fundamental and mysterious. When I think about Mathematics, I feel cold wave in my spinal cord. Some people say that we invented Maths. Some believe that it’s merely an extension of human reasoning and logic, but if you ask me the reality, mathematics is part of the universe. It was there, and it will remain there regardless of our understanding and discovering it. Look how strange it is that it grew out of our head yet it fits across the universe and across space and time. It’s completely astonishing that it evolved out of our mind. We discovered it as a tool as a language to communicate, to know what’s going on in the universe, and it works. To give you an idea of how strange it is. I give you an example. Consider again how vast is this universe as I told you in part 16, and then consider your insignificance, but despite this on a small planet Earth we invented a thing called Mathematics, and it worked perfectly well throughout the universe. Even billions of light years away from us a black hole perfectly obeys the equations of mathematics. Is this all designed, created, happening and running by its own. Nay, it is all by the Will and command of your Lord. So which of the favors of your Lord will you deny?

Now let me tell you a little more about stars and what different shapes they can assume at the end of their life as a star. People have a lot of confusion in understanding the different terms used in cosmology and astronomy. In the following programs, I will explain you a little about almost all important celestial bodies in the simplest possible words so that you will never forget, and also in a way that will make easy to differentiate between them. Remember again that all this will help you later to understand the religious scriptures in a better way and to understand that how your Lord is running His Kingdom.

Before starting this journey in space let me first explain to you a fundamental concept about the matter without which you will not be able to understand the following discussion. You are familiar with three forms of matter in daily life Solid Liquid and gases. You know that when you move yourself or your hand, it can quickly pass through gas or air around you without any difficulty while in the water you can move with a little force but you cannot pass yourself or your hand from a piece of iron or stone or a wall. You think that these things are solid, condensed and tightly filled with matter that’s why you cannot pass your finger or hand thru it. What if I tell you that it is all vacuum even inside solids, or better say it’s all space inside that. This is what the reality is. When we dug inside matter we found something bizarre. You know all matter everything you see around is made up of atoms. Atom is so small that in only one human cell which you cannot see without microscope there are almost 100 trillion atoms. If you put 500,000 atoms in a row shoulder to shoulder than they only be as wide as the thickness of a human hair. But when you try to look inside this small thing, i.e. atom what you see there is that in the center there is a nucleus which contains protons and neutrons and on its outside are electrons. Now comes the craziest thing which is that inside an atom there is all space nothing else. An atom is 99.99999999% space. The whole mass of an atom is in the nucleus, and between nucleus and the edge of the atom, there are enormous distances. To understand it more if you increase the size of the nucleus to that of a coin the edge of the atom would be at a distance of 2-3 kilometer. This nucleus is so small as compared to the size of an atom that it blows your mind. To understand it more if you increase the size of an atom to that of a football ground than nucleus is like size of a chickpea. And you know what is between nucleus and electrons of an atom answer is empty space. Inside atom, there is all space. This is why you can compress matter to tremendous extents. For example, the whole population of humans on earth i.e 7.4 billion people can be pressed to fit in a teaspoon.  And this thing will make you understand whats coming ahead regarding celestial bodies. Now one more thing, in physics density is the content of mass in a given volume of a substance. To understand it more, the density of iron is more than cotton because if you take a tennis ball size cotton and iron in your fist than iron has more mass in it in that given volume and thus more density. As I told you that all the mass of an atom is in its nucleus in its center. But what about the density of nucleus. It is about 2.3×10 power 17 kg/m3 and it will blow your mind again as to get a rough idea if you take a one cubic meter box and manage to fill it with 1150 billion Boeing 747 planes than the density of that box would be equal to that of the nucleus of an atom. Is this all designed, created, happening and running by its own. Nay, it is all by the Will and command of your Lord. So which of the favors of your Lord will you deny?

Now after understanding this come to the celestial bodies again. You already realized what a star is and that how big is our sun i.e so big that you can place 1.3 million earths inside sun. 695,700 km in radius. It has 5,538 degrees Celsius temperature at the surface and 15 million degrees Celsius in the core. Our sun is a little unique because it doesn’t have any partner. It’s just one sun surrounded by planets. But in the universe, solar systems have more than one sun. More than half of all stars are in multiple star systems. That means their solar system has two or more suns in it. Can you fancy having two or three suns in the sky at the same time? There are lots of planets throughout the universe where that is normal. Is this all designed, created, happening and running by its own. Nay, it is all by the Will and command of your Lord. 

Out of these trillions of galaxies, every galaxy has almost 200 billions stars. Two hundred billion stars much bigger than our sun as our sun is a relatively small type of star. While despite being a smaller star it’s so big that it contains 99.86% mass of solar system, 149 Million Km away from Earth this small star converts 4.3 million tons of matter every second into energy and is doing this since last 4.5 billion years and still it’s burning. Sun rotates in 28 days same like the moon, Produces its energy by Thermonuclear Reaction Fusion combining smaller nuclei into heavy as I already told you in detail in Part17. Sun is not a solid body, so different parts rotate at different rates. At the equator, it takes 25 days and at poles 36 days. 

Sun has three main regions first is Sun’s interior which further consists of three parts Core, the radiative zone, and the convective zone, the second is Sun’s visible surface called photosphere, and third is Sun’s atmosphere which further consists of 3 parts Chromosphere, Transition Region and Corona. Core is the central region where all energy is produced. Fusion entirely stopped in 30% of Sun’s radius i.e up till Radiative zone. Temperature is about 15million celsius. Core starts from center till 0.2 Solar radius almost 139,000 km thick. The second part of sun’s interior is the Radiative Zone starts at the edge of the core of the Sun and extends up to about 0.7 solar radius almost 350,000 Km thick. Energy from the core bounces in this region & take 170,000years to get from core to convective zone. So it takes a photon, on average, 170,000 years to travel from the core of the sun to the surface. Then it takes just 8 minutes from the suns surface to your eyes. The third part of sun’s interior is the Convective Zone, starts at around 0.7 Solar radius and goes to the outer surface almost 180,000Km thick with temperatures up to 2million celsius. Photosphere is the visible surface of the Sun, the photosphere, is the layer below which the Sun becomes opaque to visible light. It is actually a boundary between the Sun’s interior and the solar atmosphere. It is 400Km thick with an average temperature of 5,500 Celsius. Now coming to sun’s atmosphere, the chromosphere is the lower region of the solar atmosphere and is about 400 km to 2100 km above the solar surface. The temperature varies about 3700 Celsius at the bottom and 7700 Celsius at the top, so it gets hotter if you go further away from the Sun, unlike in the lower layers, where it gets hotter if you go nearer to the center of the Sun. Corona is the uppermost portion of the Sun’s atmosphere and is much hotter than the Sun’s surface photosphere. The temperature in the corona is about 500,000 Celsius to a few million Celsius. The Corona cannot be seen with the naked eye except during a total solar eclipse. Starting at about 2100 km above the solar surface the upper corona gradually turns into the solar wind which is just an extension of the Sun’s atmosphere that encompasses all of the planets. Earth actually orbits within the atmosphere of sun.

O people when the universe created, there was just hydrogen and a little helium and very little of Lithium. Stars are like factories everything else is produced in the stars like carbon, oxygen iron, etc.  It works just like layers in an onion. First Hydrogen having one proton in its nucleus starts burning by fusion under immense pressure and some 15million celsius temperature and it produces two things energy and heavier element helium with two protons in its nucleus. Then helium being heavier collects in the center and it also goes into fusion and produces energy and Carbon and Oxygen. The process goes on and heavier elements like carbon go into fusion to produce other elements until it reaches to Iron which has 26 protons in its nucleus. Here the fusion stops as Iron does not go into fusion and it keep on collecting in the center of the star until all its resources get consumed. Now because star stops burning its outward pressure come to an end because of which gravity takes over and the star collapse and explode and throw out its material in space. Such a star is called super Nova, the death of a star and birth of something new. The blast is so powerful that it forces more heavy elements like gold, lead platinum to produce. And this is fortunate for us as we could not be here if such things have not been happening. As about 5 billion years ago, stars in the Milky Way had generated 92 elements of the periodic table now present on Earth. Every ingredient in the human body is made from elements made by stars. So are all of the building blocks of our food, our mobile, and our vehicles. Similarly, every plant, animal, stone, grains of sand and drop of water owes its existence to distant stars. Most of the material that we’re made of comes out of dying stars. We have stuff in us as old as the universe. The basic ingredients for life on Earth, often called the building blocks of life, can be abbreviated as CHNOPS carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every atom of our body was once inside a star. Perhaps the atoms of our right hand belongs to one star and left hand of another star. We are actually made up of star dust. Every atom in our body had experienced the most violent explosion may be not once but many times. We are really children of stars. 

Is this all designed, created, happening and running by its own. Nay, it is all by the Will and command of your Lord. So which of the favors of your Lord will you deny?

Recitation of the Holy Scripture.

Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of the night and day are surely Signs for men of understanding. Those who remember God standing and sitting and on their sides and think on the creation of the heavens and the earth, “Our Lord, You have not created all this in falsehood. Glory be to You; so save us from the punishment of the Fire.