The term “a niche in which is a lamp” in the verse may be interpreted as the niche being the area of gravitational lens effect of a black hole. (Allah knows the truth.) It is significant that in describing the effect that arises, NASA scientists use the analogy of the effect of a drinking glass:

The gravitational effect of the galaxy on the distant quasar was similar to the lens effect of a drinking glass on a distant street light – it created multiple images lenses here too.3

In his book The Whole Shebang, regarded as one of the leading books of the 20th century by the New York Times, the science writer Timothy Ferris clarifies the subject as follows:

As light from a Quasar travels towards us… it may pass through either side of an intervening cluster of galaxies. The warped space surrounding the cluster can act as a lens, with a result that we see two images of what is (or was) actually one quasar.4


NASA's Hubble Space Telescope caught a single quasar in space producing images of five separate stars for the very first time. Bodies with a high density – a group of galaxies here – produce more than one image by giving rise to the gravitational lens effect, bending the light from objects behind them, in this