Tariq means “night visitor” or “star”, since stars appear at night. After the discovery of pulsars, which are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars that emit powerful beams of electromagnetic radiation, some modern Muslim scholars say that tariq refers to these stars, and this interpretation fits the Quranic verse perfectly, because in Arabic tariq means ‘thing that knocks’, and pulsars were initially called ‘knocking stars’, stars that make a constant knocking sound when listened to on a radio receiver.