The Insight
Surah Al-Qiyama describes the unravelling of the cosmos at the end of time. Among its signs: «the sun and the moon are joined together.» For most of history this was read purely as imagery of cosmic collapse. Modern astrophysics added an unexpected dimension. Our sun is a middle-aged star. In roughly five billion years it will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and swell into a red giant, expanding hundreds of times beyond its current size, until it engulfs Mercury, Venus, and almost certainly the Earth and its Moon. The Earth-Moon system, drawn into the body of the dying sun, would cease to exist as separate worlds. The sun and the moon, in the most literal sense, joined. This is a prediction, not a confirmed event. It lies billions of years ahead, and no instrument will ever record it. But the model itself is well-established stellar physics. A 7th-century text described an end in which the sun and moon become one, an outcome the science of stellar death would not describe until the 20th century.