Before I briefly list what science has thus far unraveled about this amazingly and infinitely mysterious universe with our ridiculously limited tools of sensory perception (!) I would like to talk a little about the concept of distance.

If we know our speed of travel then we can calculate how long it will take to reach a particular destination, right?

For example, if you’re in a vehicle travelling at 100 km per hour then it will take approximately 4-5 hours to reach a city, say Ankara, that is around 450km away from Istanbul. This allows us to have a sense of the distance of Ankara, according to the speed of our vehicle. Or we can take as example a city 1000 km away from Istanbul and say the equator of the world is forty times this distance, to make it easier to comprehend. 

But if I show you the sun and tell you there is one and a half million km between the Earth and the Sun this would have no meaning for you as you have no reference to what the distance of one and a half million km feels like. And yet this enormous distance, which we have no way of understanding, is like talking about the distance between your nail and your skin, in contrast to the infinite vastness of the universe!

Ah the universe…

In a single galaxy there is said to be about 400 billion solar systems like ours! Yet our galaxy, the Milky Way, comprising of 400 billions solar systems, is hardly a medium sized galaxy in contrast to other much greater ones. Our solar system is approximately 32,000 light years away from the center of our galaxy. 

The Milky Way, together with Andromeda, the Triangulum Galaxy and thirty other nearby galaxies, constitutes the Local Group.

The Virgo constellation is the most important constellation of stars after the Local Group. There are more than three thousand galaxies clustered in the center of the Virgo constellation. Considering there are billions of stars within each of these galaxies and each of these stars probably form the center of a system, each with their set of planets, it would be correct to say the enormity of the universe is not at all comprehendible to the human mind.

Within a section of the sky as big as the moon there are approximately 400 galaxies and so far about one billion of them have been photographed.

So, to sum it up:

The size of the sun is one million three hundred and three thousand times the size of the earth. There are around 400 billion stars, most of which are bigger than the Sun, in our galaxy, the Milky Way, alone. 

And there are about one billion galaxies that we know of, like our galaxy. So where is Earth in all of this? 

How much space does it even take up?

Perhaps like the size of a virus in comparison to the size of the Sun?

We’re talking about the creator of a universe that comprises a billion Milky Ways, each composed of hundreds of billions of Suns!

Muhammad (saw) referred to this creator with the name “Allah”. 

But from Tao to Nirvana, it has been given many many other names…