Ramadan in an ‘unprecedented time’
Coronavirus changes Islam’s month of charity, praying and meals
Not long ago, Mohammed Nasrullah had to pray with his face pushed into waxed paper in his mosque’s prayer room. It was meant to protect him from germs; he was just glad it wasn’t a paper towel — those are absorbent, and may have collected dust or other worldly things that would distract him as he prayed at his Clear Lake mosque.
“It was strange,” he said. “It felt different.”
That was before concerns about germs and pandemics loomed in the periphery of every decision to touch a door, shake a hand or, for Nasrullah and other Muslims, perform daily prayers that include resting their faces on the floor.
In America and other parts of the western hemisphere, Thursday evening will mark the start of Ramadan, a 30-day period during which Muslims fast during sunlight and meet for communal praying and meals — the iftars —in the evenings.
Not this year.
On Wednesday — and with Ramadan fast-approaching — Nasrullah and his wife, Ruth, briefly returned to the mosque for the first time since the prayer with waxed paper.
Standing without shoes in the empty prayer room, their masks muddied their voices while the faint hum of a lawn mower outside echoed across the room.
They wondered what Islam’s holiest days would be like spent in quarantine, or what their mosque, community and world may look like in a post-coronavirus era.
“It’s the lack of knowing,” Ruth Nasrullah said. “It’s just driving me crazy. Everything has just kind of stopped.”
Many of the world’s roughly 1.5 billion Muslims have had similar questions this week as COVID-19 continues to spread, killing thousands each day.
In-person gatherings for Ramadan have either been canceled or significantly curtailed in most majority-Muslim countries, including in Saudi Arabia, where meals for the needy will not be passed out at the Prophet Muhammad’s mosque in Medina.
In the Houston region, which is home to roughly 70,000 Muslims , most mosques have also stopped gatherings, despite a recent exec
“It is the duty of any Muslim, as it is of any other human being, to protect others.”
Sohail Syed, president of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston
in space. In 1969, the National Academy of Sciences provided its support. After nearly a decade of political and budget wrangling, the project got funded and began in 1977.
David Leckrone, however, had started a year earlier. To him, it was the most important thing an astronomer could do. There had been telescopes launched into space, but those lacked sophisticated cameras.
And ground-based telescopes have always been handicapped by Earth’s light-distorting atmosphere. That’s why stars appear to twinkle even though they emit a steady stream of light.
“Humans for thousands of years had been looking up at the stars and had never seen stars clearly,” said Leckrone, who would spend 33 years working on Hubble, including 17 years as the Hubble Project's lead scientist. “Astronomers don’t want to see stars twinkling.”
He was in Florida when space shuttle Discovery launched the telescope. And he remembers the anticipation. The feeling that, after 14 years, the project was finally starting.
But that optimism would be quickly deflated. Hubble’s early photos came back blurry, caused by a manufacturing error that ground off too much glass from the telescope’s primary mirror.
The science community came up with a fix, building replacement instruments and corrective mirrors to counter the flaw. These were installed by a space shuttle crew in 1993, and every instrument since then has been built with this correction.
“We lost over three years,” Leckrone said. “We did good science, but it wasn’t the expected science.”
Newfound clarity
Since 1993, however, Hubble has beamed down images both beautiful and insightful.
One of Hubble’s achievements came from examining a much-disputed question: At what speed is the universe currently expanding? Scientists were surprised to learn the universe’s expansion was speeding up. They had thought it should be slowing down. This discovery won a Nobel Prize in 2011.
Hubble also has been instrumental in studying planets orbiting other stars. At the time Hubble launched, researchers didn’t know of any planets outside the Earth’s solar system. Since then, ground- and space-based telescopes have discovered the prevalence of exoplanets, and Hubble has allowed researchers to learn more about them, such as the size of these planets and what makes up their atmospheres.
And a third major finding is a glimpse into the universe’s past. It was controversial at first, using 10 days of precious telescope time in 1995 to stare at a nearly empty patch of sky, but the project revealed galaxies fainter and farther than had previously been seen. Some of the light captured by Hubble in 1995 traveled for more than 10 billion years before reaching Earth’s orbit.
“You’re looking at objects that, at this moment, don’t look like that anymore,” Brown said. “You’re looking to a time shortly after the Big Bang.”
Hubble has since continued this research, peering back even farther to galaxies emitting light when the universe, now 13.8 billion years old, was only a few hundred million years old.
And according to Leckrone, such iterative research has been one of Hubble’s greatest strengths. Researchers have been able to use Hubble again and again, answering new questions that arise with each study.
Hubble ‘completely vital’
For Becker and Molyneux, with the Southwest Research Institute, a main benefit of Hubble has been examining the cosmos through its capability to observe in the ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Electromagnetic energy travels in waves that span a continuum from very long radio waves to very short gamma rays. The human eye can only see a small section of this spectrum, visible light, whereas other machines like radios and Xrays use other portions of the spectrum. Hubble can study visible light, ultraviolet and infrared.
Chemical elements and molecules have unique signatures that show up as different patterns of light and dark at different wavelengths. But due to Earth’s atmosphere, it’s impossible to study the universe at ultraviolet wavelengths using ground-based telescopes.
“Hubble is completely vital for that,” Molyneux said.
Becker and Molyneux know that frozen water, for instance, lights up in a very specific way when examined in ultraviolet. But some of the moons around Jupiter, which non-ultraviolet observations have shown to have ice, don’t light up as expected. That’s likely due to either radiation from Jupiter or having other substances mixed into the frozen water.
With Hubble aging, they’re motivated to conduct their research quickly. The next major space telescope, James Webb, won’t have an ultraviolet capability. It will use infrared wavelengths to study the universe’s early days.
Brown expects researchers will be able to use both telescopes for a while. James Webb is slated to launch next year, and he expects Hubble will survive past 2025. Leckrone said it could even be providing insights to the year 2030, or beyond.
“All my experience tells me that Hubble won’t just die suddenly,” Leckrone said. “It’ll keep doing wonderful science. It will have some overlap with James Webb, maybe many years with James Webb.”