By the time you finish reading this sentence, you will have been carried over the earth, passed the sun, and moved through actual space of 1000 kms! In the time it takes you to ponder upon this, you will have moved another 1000 km through real space. Fast isn’t it? This is the speed at which one arm of our galaxy moves through space every second, and we don’t even feel a thing!

The motion of stars in their dedicated orbits, black holes, nebulas, and infinite number of other phenomena in the outer space display spectacular and equally thoughtful exhibitions thanks to Hubble and other new technologies. An increasing number of studies are thus devoted to stars, supernovas and interstellar space in recent years. Our contemplation of the universe deepens as we accrue more knowledge about it. Just as a cell is the functional building unit of the body, the main building blocks of the universe are galaxies. Just like every other living thing, galaxies will not be around for eternity; they form, develop, and cease within the cosmic laws that are put in place by their Creator.

According latest findings, it is estimated that around 100 billion galaxies exist in the observable universe and that there are galaxies 100,000 light years in size. A year has 31,536,000 seconds. Light travels 300,000 kilometers per second, therefore one light year equals to 946,080,000,000,000,000 (quadrillion) kilometers. Apart from the dispersal of stars, intergalactic distances of galaxies are not much bigger than their own galactic size. For example, the big Andromeda galaxy (the galaxy which is the closest to us) appear from the earth as wide as the sun or moon in the sky and can even be noticed with the naked eye. Latest research in astrophysics revealed that stars are not dispersed equally but rather found together in galaxies as an open system that exchanges energy and matter with its surroundings. A big portion of the galactic space is filled with gas and dust clouds which enable such exchanges to take place. This interstellar stage in which stars are born and die bears vital importance in sustaining and maintaining a galactic presence.

Some amazing characteristics of galaxies

Stars with different masses exist in a galaxy. Smallest one can be one tenth of the Sun’s mass whereas the biggest can be 100 times bigger than the sun. The most important feature of a star in a galaxy is its mass. Brightness of stars increase with their mass and this relation is three dimensional (cubic mass). Therefore if a star is twice as big, it is eight times brighter. Another feature is the relation between the age and mass of a star. The bigger the star, the shorter its life. These big stars live shorter compared to smaller ones despite their giant fuel reserves because they consume it very fast. Similar relations can be observed in the human body, which is an index of the universe, such that overweight people who consume more calories than people with less calorie intake eventually consumes more energy and become subject to deterioration in health and faster aging. The lifespan of a star is inversely proportional with its square mass (1/m2). For example, if a star is twice as massive, it lives only for one fourth of the time. Calculations show that our sun has a lifespan of 10 billion years. Compared to this, if a star is 30 times bigger than sun, it will only live for 10 million years.

The timescale of events that are occurring in galaxies can vary from thousands of years up to millions of years. Time required for the creation of a star is perhaps like a day in a galactic scale. This long time frame is considered short when compared with the age of galaxies. Furthermore, verses in the Qur’an (Al-Ma’arij 70:4) open new horizons in this matter and point out to the fact that time can change depending on different ratios and scales; so a day can indeed vary in length from being 1000 years or 50,000 years.

The movement and behavior of galaxies are quite complicated. Such that even if the galaxy formation process is completed, the creation and expiration process of stars within the galaxy still continues. It takes tens of thousands of years for a gas cloud to collapse inwards under its own gravitational force and become a star under normal conditions. Even five-ten billion years after the creation of a galaxy, it amazes scientists that there is still plenty of gas to remain in the interstellar stage, enough for a star to be born. On the other hand there are galaxies in which star formation is much faster than our Milky Way galaxy. These galaxies are called “starburst” galaxies and new stars are created in variable speeds over a long period of time. The uniqueness that is observed in the specific characterization of animal and plant species can also be witnessed in the creation of stars at different speeds, making spiral galaxies even more mysterious. This is because while a steady and balanced speed in the creation of stars is maintained in spiral galaxies, all the gas and dust available is consumed for the formation of stars in other galaxies. In a galaxy where stars continue to be created, the regions where large stars are created can be observed better compared to other regions in the night sky.

Spiral galaxies

Galaxies are generally divided into three groups: irregular shaped, elliptical, and spiral. Irregular shaped galaxies are composed of many young stars, gas and dust clouds without a definite shape. Elliptical galaxies are made up of old stars and limited number of gas and dust clouds. They are created in different shapes such as round, flat or like a baseball. Spiral galaxies are in the shape of a disc composed of spiral arms extending out of the center as they rotate. Solar system is located inside such a spiral-like galaxy. In these types of galaxies, stars contain spiral signatures. Bright spiral arms found in many images taken of galaxies generally show star forming regions and not the locations of the stars themselves. That is why the exceptional quality of spiral galaxies is hidden in the continual formation and expiration process of stars. Spiral displays which show star creation regions do not revolve along other stars in the galaxy. However spiral galaxies do exhibit a special rotation. Observations point out that spiral signature within the galaxy deteriorates gradually and reshapes in a slower fashion than the galaxy rotation speed. With these new findings, it is possible to say that it is more appropriate to understand galaxies as dynamic systems which change in time instead of being static under the constant and instantaneous intervention and control of the infinite power and wisdom of the Almighty.

One of the most impressive features of spiral galaxies is that the regions where stars are created in the main spiral contain new sublevel spiral patterns. Just like clouds, it is possible for different spiral forms to be created. Sometimes very symmetric spiral arms or rectangular stick-like formations via extensions of spiral arms along with regular spiral looking shapes are generated. Despite this spiral variety, when observed from outside, stars are seen to be surrounding a flat disc and forming together as a giant globular halo. This halo was generated billions of years ago from short and longer aged stars. It is the dimmer region of the galaxy yet this halo is considered to contain most of the galactic material. Stars are located in a fashion that resembles a disc in this halo of dust and gas. The layer of dust slowly rotates around an axis that passes through the center of the halo. This rotation is not coincidental; it is controlled in such a way that the speed of stars nearby do not differ in the rotation speed of the whole disc any more than 10%. In other words, the disc does not have a constant speed. It exhibits flexibility and variations from within. Stars and gas clouds are made to revolve in similar average speeds no matter how far they are away from the center. These notions are confirmed with the use of motion laws that Newton discovered and named after himself.

Numerous types of stars from different age and mass groups exist in the disc section of a galaxy. The age of stars is determined by analyses of the light spectrum that they emit. According to the results from these analyses, the creation speed of stars has been found nearly constant around the disc section in a spiral galaxy. In many galaxies, disc material has been discovered to be around 10% gas and dust cloud and that 80-90% of the rest remains outside the disc in an invisible form, unlike stars and gasses. This is because it absorbs the majority of the light to be reflected. This kind of material is called “dark matter.” It is thought to be a very old black hole, with expired stars or an extremely cold dust cloud or a combination of these. Aside from this, it has been discussed that they are created from neutrinos or undiscovered particles. According to common notion, dark matter as generated by expired stars in the galaxy does not have any relation to the movement of spiral galaxies and their kinetic behavior, it only has gravitational effects.

Gas cloud in the disc is not dispersed proportionately; instead, it is collected in a thin layer. Furthermore, it is understood that these clouds are composed mainly of carbon, silicon, iron and many other elements, and these particles get ripped from surfaces and flown around via star winds or thrown towards interstellar space. Surprisingly, the interstellar space is a scarcely populated place. Even in areas that are considered to be empty, one atom exists in 1,000 cm3, and it can vary from one million atoms to a couple hundred per cm3 in denser regions. The density of interstellar spaces from the highest to the lowest can vary within a factor of a billion. This ratio is much greater than the density difference between air and a piece of rock.

Systems established without thermal equilibrium

Interstellar space is not in a state of thermodynamic balance. Very sizable molecular clouds are constantly shaped and get scattered into the medium. This way material exchange is carried out in between different phases on a smaller scale. Maintenance of a system where different components are preserved in a stable state with no equilibrium is a mystery to all. This elusive phenomenon has been studied by both physicists and chemists for the last 40-50 years. Data obtained so far recommends that two processes are particularly used to establish and maintain stable compounds away from an equilibrium state. The first is that such systems should include material recycling mechanisms between different components. Second is the regulation of processing speed with feedback. These two events should be executed with a balanced fashion so that the amount of material in each composition does not change. Thus, these two phenomena are executed in the most finely calibrated manner in spiral galaxies that can never be possible out of coincidence.

Plasma, one of the phases of matter, is about a couple million degrees Celsius. However, it is a much diluted phase; only one atom exists in a volume of 1,000 cm3. Temperatures rising to these levels are made possible by the energy provided from supernovas. A supernova explosion releases such energy into the space that it forms a hot gas cloud and this starts to expand. This gas cloud releases its electrons into its surroundings as it dissipates. A phase of diluted hot plasma in a bumpy shape is generated as gas cloud expands throughout the matter. One of the reasons that interstellar space took so long to be discovered is because we are still located in a hot bubble. This bubble has a magnitude of 300 light years. Studies so far have mapped this bubble and discovered it to have an irregular shape.

Aside from this, recently a new neutron star was discovered and this star is thought to be remnant of a supernova explosion that created this bubble. It should not be surprising that we are located in such a hot bubble because this only occupies 70% of our galactic disc volume. A supernova is created once every 30 or 40 years in our galaxy. Supernovas have the task of supplying the energy needed to keep the entire interstellar space under a constant pressure. It is an incredible phenomenon to ponder that a habitable planet exists in the depths of a cold space.

Interstellar spaces resemble an ecosystem from a standpoint of events that are taking place inside it. Each galaxy could be viewed as a dynamic system where stars are constantly born and extinguished in the presence of a determined cycle of energy and matter. Events that are executed with Divine wisdom in these heavenly systems (galaxies, stars, interstellar spaces) testify in their own languages to their Creator who fashioned them in the form of an art with wisdom and generously. Galaxies behave as if they are living organisms; they are born like humans and they die like humans. Continual composition and decomposition of galaxies with their contents stand as major proof to the cosmos of present and absent worlds. The heavens and the earth, the stars and galaxies all make up the Divine canvas painted and repainted on the easel of God’s command: “Be and it is.”

References

• Smolin, Lee. 1997. The Life of The Cosmos, Oxford University Press, New York.
• Syed, Ibrahim B. 2003. “Understanding String Theory,” The Fountain, Issue 41, January-March 2003.

His dreams drove him crazy; a crab had pierced its claws into his brain. He forsook his prayers and devotions, and neither ate nor slept.

Unable to rest tranquilly in one place, he wandered to a meadow, his head confused with the charms of his vain fancies. An old man was kneading mud upon a grave in order to make bricks. Absorbed in thought, the old man said:

“O foolish soul! Hearken to my counsel. Why have you attached your mind to that gold brick when one day they will make bricks from your dust? The mouth of a covetous man is so wide open that it can be closed again by one morsel. Take, O base man, your hand off that brick, for you cannot dam the river of your avarice with it.

“So negligent have you been in the thought of gain and riches that the stock of your life has become trampled underfoot. The dust of desire has blinded the eyes of your reason-the wind of desire has destroyed the harvest of your life.”

“Wipe negligence from your eyes, for will you not be buried under the dust tomorrow?

“Your life is a bird, and its name is Breath. When the bird has flown from its cage it does not return to captivity.

“Be watchful, for the world lasts but a moment, and a moment spent in wisdom is better than an age in folly.

“Why do we fix our minds upon this caravanserai? Our friends have departed and we are on the road. After us, the same flowers will bloom in the garden, and the same friends will still be sitting.

“When you arrive in Shiraz,² do you not clean from yourself the dust of the road?

“Soon, O you are polluted with the dust of sin, you will journey to a strange city. Weep, and wash away the impurities with your tears.”

Footnotes

1. Sadi of Shiraz (1209-1291) was one of the greatest poets of Persia. Sadi, the traveler, was born in Baghdad and saw a great part of the world before he finally settled in Shiraz, where he died. This story was taken from his work The Orchard.
2. The city of Shiraz represents one’s native land.

I was in a country which Taha had never visited and yet his memory was closer to me than it had been for years. Perhaps it was my new solitude, perhaps he came to me in dreams I could not recall. Or was my mind reeling from the newness surrounding me? I was in London for a one year contract with the BBC World Service. Each day as I read the news in Arabic, my voice, cool and distant, reached my husband in Kuwait, and my parents who were looking after my daughters in Khartoum.

Now I was older than Taha had been when he died. At that time he was ten years older than me and like my other brothers he had humoured me and spoiled me. When he died, my mind bent a little and has never straightened since. How could a young mind absorb the sudden death of a brother on the day of his wedding? It seemed at first to be a ghastly mistake, but that was an illusion, a mirage. The Angel of Death makes no mistakes, he is a reliable servant who never fails to keep his appointment at the predetermined time and place. Taha had no premonition of his own death. He was fidgety, impatient but not for that, not for the end coming so soon. It was too painful to think of what must have been his own shock, his own useless struggle against the inevitable. Nor did anyone else have foreknowledge. How could we, when we were steeped in wedding preparations and our house was full of relatives helping with the wedding meal? From the misty windows I saw the words ‘Gulf Air’ written in Arabic and English on the doors of the airline’s office and imagined myself one day buying a ticket to go to Hamid in Kuwait. It seemed that the fate of our generation is separation, from our country or our family. We are ready to go anywhere in search of the work we cannot find at home. Hamid says that there are many Sudanese in Kuwait and he hopes that in the next year or so the girls and I will join him. Every week, I talk to him on the telephone, long leisurely conversations. We run up huge telephone bills but seem to be unable to ration our talks. He tells me amusing stories of the emirs whose horses he cures. In Sudan, cattle die from starvation or disease all the time, cattle which are the livelihood of many people. But one of the country’s few veterinary surgeons is away, working with animals whose purpose is only to amuse. Why? So that his daughters can have a good education, so that he can keep up with the latest research in his field. So that he can justify the years of his life spent in education by earning the salary he deserves. And I thought of Taha’s short life and wondered.

In Regent Street the conductor had to shake himself from his lethargy and prevent more people from boarding the bus. The progress of the bus was slow in contrast to the shoppers who swarmed around in the brightly lit streets. Every shop window boasted an innovative display and there were new decorative lights in addition to the street lights. Lights twined around the short trees on the pavements, on wires stretched across the street. Festive December lights. Blue, red, green lights, more elaborate than the crude strings of bulbs that we use in Khartoum to decorate the wedding house. But the lights for Taha’s wedding had not shone as they were meant to on that night. By night time he was already buried and we were mourning not celebrating. Over the period of mourning, the wedding dinner was gradually eaten by visitors. The women indoors, sitting on mattresses spread on the floors, the men on wobbling metal chairs in a tent pitched in front of our house, the dust of the street under their feet. But they drank water and tea and not the sweet orange squash my mother and her friends had prepared by boiling small oranges with sugar. That went to a neighbour who was bold enough to ask about it. Her children carried the sweet liquid from our house in large plastic bottles, their eyes bright, their lips moist with expectation.

When Taha died I felt raw and I remained transparent for a long time. Death had come so close to me that I was almost exhilarated; I could see clearly that not only life but the world was transient. But with time my heart hardened and I became immersed in the cares of day to day life. I had become detached from this vulnerable feeling and it was good to recapture it now and grieve once again.

Taha’s life. I was not there for a large part of it but I remember the time he got engaged and my own secret feelings of jealousy towards his fiance. Muddled feelings of admiration and a desire to please. She was a university student and to my young eyes she seemed so articulate and self-assured. I remember visiting her room in the universiey hostels while Taha waited for us outside by the gate, hands in his pockets, maxing patterns in the dust with his feet. Her room was in lively disarray with clothes and shoes scattered about and colourful posters on the wall. It was full of chatting room-mates and friends who kept coming in and out to eat the last biscuits in the open packet on the desk, borrow the prayer mat or dab their eyes with kohl from a silver flask. They scrutinized my face for any likeness to Taha, laughed at jokes I could not understand, while I sat nervously on the edge of a bed, smiling and unable to speak. Later, with Taha, we went to a concert in the football grounds where a group of students sang. I felt very moved by a song in the form of a letter written by a political prisoner to his mother. Taha’s bride afterwards wrote the words out for me, humming the tune, looking radiant, and Taha remarked how elegant her handwriting was.

In the shop windows dummies posed, aloof strangers in the frenzied life of Oxford street. Wools, rich silks and satin dresses. ‘Taha, shall I wear tonight the pink or the green?’, I asked him ‘See, I look like-like a watermelon in this green’. His room was an extension of the house where a verandah used to be, a window from the hall still looked into it, the door is made of shutters. He never slept in his room. In the early evening we all dragged our beds outdoors so that the sheets are cool when it’s time to gaze up at the stars. If it rained Taha did not care, he covered his head with the sheet and continued to sleep. When the dust came thick, I shook his shoulder to wake him up to go indoors and he shouted at me to leave him alone. In the morning his hair was covered with dust, sand in his ears, his eyelashes. He sneezed and blamed me for not insisting, for failing to get him to move inside. I see him now: he smiles at me in my green dress, his suitcase half-filled lies open on the floor, he leans against the shutters holding them shut with his weight. Through them filter the hisses and smells of frying, the clinking of empty water glasses scented with incense and the thud of a hammer on a slab of ice, the angry splinters flying in the air, disintegrating, melting in surrender when they greet the warm floor. Someone is calling for the bridegroom, an aunt cups a hand round her mouth, tongue strong and dancing from side to side she trills joy cry. When others join her the sound rises in waves to fill the whole house. Is it a tape or is someone singing this ridiculous song, Our bridegroom like honey. Where can you ever find another like him? He tells me words I know to be absurd but want to believe. Tonight you will look more beautiful than the bride.

The bus headed north, and we passed Regents Park and the Central Mosque; all was peaceful and dark after the congestion of the shopping centre. I was glad that there were no more coloured lights for they are cheerful and false. I had held others like them before in my hands wiping the dust off each bulb and saying to Taha, ‘How could you have taken them from the electrician when they were so dusty?’ And he had helped me clean them with an orange cloth that he used for the car because he was in a hurry to set them up all around the outside of the house. I had teased him saying that the colours were not in an ordered pattern. We laughed together trying to make sense of their order but they were random, chaotic. Then Hamid who was his friend arrived and said he would help him set them up. I asked Taha to get me a present from Nairobi where he was going for his honeymoon and Hamid had looked directly at me, laughed in his easy way and said without hiding his envy, ‘He is not going to have time to get you any presents.’ At that time, Hamid and I were not even engaged and I felt shy from his words and walked away from his gaze.

It was the lights which killed Taha. The haphazard, worn strings of lights, that had been hired out for years to house after wedding house. A bare live wire carelessly touched. A rushed drive to the hospital where I watched a stray cat twist and rub its thin body around the legs of our bridegroom’s death bed. And in the crowded corridors, people squatted on the floor and the screams for Taha were absorbed by the dirty walls, and listless flies, and by the generous who had room and tears for a stranger they had never met before.

My mother, always a believing woman, wailed and wept but did not pour dirt on her head or tear her clothes like some ignorant women do. She just kept saying again and again, ‘I wish I never lived to see this day.’ Hamid maybe had the greatest shock for he was with Taha when he was setting up the lights. Later, he told me that when they buried Taha he had stayed at the graveside after the other men had gone. He had prayed to strengthen his friend’s soul at its crucial moment of questioning. The moment in the grave, in the interspace between death and eternity when the Angels ask the soul, ‘Who is your Lord?’ and there must be no wavering in the reply, no saying ‘I don’t know’. The answer must come swiftly with confidence and it was for this assurance, in the middle of what must have been Taha’s fear, that Hamid prayed.

I had been in London for nearly seven months and had told no one about Taha. I felt that it would sound distasteful or like a bad joke, but electricity had killed others in Khartoum too, though I did not know them personally. A young boy once urinated at the foot of a lamp light which had a base from which wires stuck out exposed. And a girl in my school was cleaning a fridge, squatting barefoot in a puddle of melted ice with the electric socket too close. The girl’s younger sister was in my class and the whole class, forty girls, went in the school bus to visit the family at home. On the way we sang songs as if we were on a school picnic and I cannot help but remember that day with pleasure.

With time, the relationship between my family and Taha’s bride soured. Carefully prepared dishes ceased to pass between my mother and hers. In the two ‘Id festivals, when we celebrated first the end of the fasting month of Ramadan and then the Feast of Sacrifice, our families no longer visited. Out of a sense of duty, my parents had proposed that she marry another of my brothers but she and her family refused. Instead, she married one of her cousins who was not very educated, not as much as Taha at any rate. Sometimes, I would see her in the streets of Khartoum with her children and we would only greet each other if our eyes met.

In Taha’s memory, my father built a small school in his home village on the Blue Nile. One classroom built of mud to teach young children to read and write. The best charity for the dead is something continuous that goes on yielding benefit over time. But, like other schools it kept running into difficulties; no books, costly paper, poor attendance when children were sometimes kept at home to help their parents. Yet my father persevered and the school had become something of a hobby for him in his retirement. It is also a good excuse for him to travel frequently from the capital to the village and visit his old friends and family. What my mother did for Taha was more simple. She bought a zeer, a large clay pot and had it fastened to a tree in front of our house. The zeer held water, keeping it cool and it was covered by a round piece of wood on which stood a tin mug for drinking. Early in the morning, I would fill with water from the fridge and throughout the day passers-by, he and thirsty from the glaring sun could drink, resting in the shade the tree. In London, I came across the same idea, memorial benches, inscribed with names, placed in gardens and parks where people could rest. My mother would never believe that anyone would voluntarily sit in the sun but then she had never seen cold, dark evenings like these.

It was time for me to get off as the bus had long passed Lords, Swiss Cottage and Golders Green. There were only a few passengers left. After dropping me off the bus would turn around to resume its cycle. And my grief for Taha comes in cycles as well, over the years, rising and falling back. Like the appearance of the West Indian conductor, it is difficult to predict. Perhaps he will be on the bus tomorrow evening. ‘Like them Christmas lights?’ he will ask, and, grateful to see a familiar face amidst the alien darkness and damp, I will say, ‘Yes, I admire the coloured lights.’