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“I swear by the positions of the stars. This is an awesome oath, if you only knew” 56:75-76
The number of stars in our “Milky Way” galaxy is about 200 billion stars; and our galaxy is about average in size with regards to number of stars.
Galaxies on average have between 100 billion and 1 trillion numbers of stars. Thats 100,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000,000
Astronomers estimate that there are approximately 100 billion to 1 trillion galaxies in the Universe. So if we multiply those two numbers together, we get between 1022 and 1024 stars in the Universe. How many stars? There are between 10 sextillion and 1 septillion stars in the Universe. That’s a large number of stars.
From planet earth, we can only see a small number of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy, the ones which are in that part of the galaxy that is nearest us. Most of the galaxy is hidden behind vast clouds of dust and gases. And other galaxies are too far away for most small telescopes to pick out individual stars.
When we come to the positions of stars, we are faced with a momentous different issue.
The gigantic number of stars in the universe makes the exact knowledge of the position of every star a virtual impossibility. But this is only the smaller problem. The bigger problem is that stars are on the constant move. Our own Sun is moving through space at about 30 kilometres per second in the direction of the star Vega.
Other stars are moving along with their galaxies at astronomical speeds. The speed of far away galaxies can be derived from their red shift. It was found that the most distant galaxies are travelling at speeds approaching 80% of the speed of light. This amounts to about 240,000 kilometres per second.
What this means is that the position of any such star in such distant galaxy has actually moved by that vast distance after only one second.
Note that the words in the Quranic verse above speak of the dynamic “positions” of stars rather than the static position. These words relate to the continuously changing positions of all the stars in the universe.
God Almighty knows the exact position of every star at every moment in time.
Can we comprehend why this oath is indeed an awesome one?
The position of stars - 56:75-76 ,
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