Part 17

Recitation of the Holy Scripture.

Do you not see that to God prostrates whoever is in the heavens and whoever is on the earth and the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the trees, the moving creatures and many of the people? It is He Who shows you His Signs and sends down provision for you from the sky. Yet none takes heed except he who constantly turns to God. 

End of Recitation of the Holy Scripture.

O humankind, 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. This will also help you later to understand the religious scriptures in a better way. Knowledge of science and understanding of cosmology is the first thing given to the thinking minds, then after that, God gives them wisdom, and lastly in case of prophets, scriptures or books. Observation of the universe and curiosity about all this around is the first thing with which every thinking mind, every chosen slave has been bestowed in his childhood and youth. It is that curiosity about the universe around them and how its running and the curiosity of whats going on earth, why we are here and why is there death and misery, that makes such people sensitive. I have already given you an idea of the vastness of the Kingdom of God around you. But this universe, this Kingdom of God, is only one out of many others, and the vastness of this is also just a limited idea of the observable part of it which has come under our knowledge.  

 

Now let me introduce you to different celestial bodies and phenomena happening in this Universe. I have already told you the concept of Light year and enormous distances in the universe in part 16.

Now as you know that our earth is a planet and our sun is a star which is one among billions of other stars in a galaxy we call MilkyWay. So Galaxies are clusters of stars. In which the number of stars ranges from less than ten million stars in Dwarf galaxies to a trillion stars in giant elliptical galaxies. More than 200 billion galaxies in the Observable universe. Most are 3300 to 330,000 Light years across. The universe is filled with only one atom per cubic meter, in other words, it is almost vacuum. MilkyWay has a diameter of 100,000LY, Thickness of 1000LY with nearly 100billion to 400billion stars in which the oldest stars are almost 13.2billion years of age. Our Sun’s distance to the core to the center of MilkyWay is 25,000LY and its rotational period around our galaxy is 225 million years. We have also divided galaxies into different body parts like Nucleus Bulge in the center, Halo and then the Spiral Arms. From earth when we look at Sagittarius we are looking at the center of our galaxy. Milky way has some dwarf Galaxies bounded to it by its gravity like Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy and Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy. They are Dwarf Elliptical galaxies. They contain about a billion stars and in the process of being consumed by Milky Way. 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 something about the stars. Stars form inside dark, cold molecular clouds. Stars usually form in clusters from clouds found in the spiral arms of galaxies from Material called InterStellar Medium, which is mostly hydrogen neutral and ionized, helium, dust particles surrounded by frozen water & other stuff like carbon, nitrogen, etc. Stars usually form in giant molecular clouds 50-200 Light Year across which are very cold at 10 Kelvin, i.e.-263 celsius & have a density of  10-1000 atoms/cm3. To form a star this need to be shrunk down to increase the density by 10 power 20 times. Protostars are stars in the process of creation. The larger the mass of a Protostar the shorter the time it takes to contract & form a star. Our sun took almost 300million years. Size does matter may be everywhere else but not in the case of stars. Greater the mass of a star, less is its lifespan as a main sequence star and lesser the mass, more is the lifespan. Thus a star having a mass 40 times more than the mass of Sun has Main Sequence age of 1 million years and a star having a mass less than half of sun has an age of almost 200 billion years. Very low mass stars less than 0.08 of the mass of sun are never be able to reach temperatures in their cores to start burning hydrogen. They produce little energy only by gravitational collapse and are called Brown Dwarfs. 

Stars give light and heat through nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium in their dense core region. There are two known sets of fusion reactions by which stars convert hydrogen to helium. Stars with mass like that of sun and less use the proton-proton chain reaction while Stars that are bigger than sun use CNO (carbon-nitrogen-oxygen) cycle. In nuclear bombs, the process we use is Fission and is different from Fusion which is happening in stars. Although in hydrogen bombs we use a combination of both to some extent. Both fission and fusion are nuclear processes by which atoms are altered to create energy. Fission is the division of one atom into two, and fusion is the joining of two lighter atoms into a larger one. Fission is used in nuclear power plants as it can be controlled, while fusion is not used to produce power since the reaction is not easily controlled and is expensive to create the needed conditions. So Fission is not as much difficult as fusion is. For fission if you get some uranium-235 and shoot a neutron at it, the uranium absorbs the neutron and becomes uranium-236. But, this uranium-236 is unstable and will break into pieces to give you energy. Plus it also creates extra neutrons to break apart even more uranium. This can also be done with plutonium and thorium.

On the other hand fusion in stars start because of the contraction of the mass towards the center of the star due to gravity. Gas and dust progress and the temperature reaches 15 million degrees while the pressure at the center of the star becomes enormous. The  electrons are torn off of their parent atoms, creating a plasma. The contraction proceeds and the nuclei in the plasma start moving faster and faster. Ultimately, they approach each other so fast that they overcome the electrical repulsion that exists between their protons. The nuclei crash into each other so hard that they unite together, or fuse. In doing so, they give off a great deal of energy. This energy from fusion flows out from the center, setting up an outward pressure in the gas around it that balances the inward pull of gravity. When the released energy reaches the outer layers of the ball of gas and dust, it moves off into