The Earth is dynamic. All of it. Plate tectonics, weather, ocean currents, biosphere, cryosphere, extraterrestrial like solar events, meteorites, nearby supernovae

And on and on and on

But the seas are constant right? I mean that they exist. They have almost always existed. No I am not going back to Porto oceans some 4 billion years ago! I am referring to the mediterranean! I hope you are up for a salty tale of disappearing sea.

This episode is all me. Because I like this topic, I have enough background to tell the story after digging through the literature, and wanted to spin this whimsical yarn in a different way than an interview.

Why is the Mediterranean Sea so confident?

• Because it’s always making waves!

But there was a time where nearly the whole mediterranean basin dried up! Called Messinian salinity crisis.

Links for Whimsical Wavelengths:

Facebook:www.facebook.com/WhimsicalWavelengths

Instagram: @whimsical.wavelengths

Bluesky: @whimsicallambda.bsky.social

Email: whimsical.wavelengths@gmail.com

Patreon: patreon.com/WhimsicalWavelengths

Welcome back to Part 2 of Gravitational lenses on Whimsical Wavelengths. In part 2 we finally get to the real star of the show, strong gravitational lensing and the paper that was underlying the topic.

“Euclid: A complete Einstein ring in NGC 6505 “

A lot less to setup this time. No need to stretch this out like gravity stretches time.

But.....

How did gravity stop the reckless driver?

It pulled some strings… mainly the ones holding the car to the road.

Before everything gets pulled downhill, time to jump in Please welcome back Dr Georgios Vernardos!

Paper at the center the this episode:

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/02/aa53014-24/aa53014-24.html

Links for Whimsical Wavelengths:

Facebook:www.facebook.com/WhimsicalWavelengths

Instagram: @whimsical.wavelengths

Bluesky: @whimsicallambda.bsky.social

Email: whimsical.wavelengths@gmail.com

Patreon: patreon.com/WhimsicalWavelengths

Whimsical wavelengths is here again to show that it is useless to fight gravity.

Every time I have, it has brought me down.

To begin I'll mention Newtonian mechanics of gravity here in the show notes as it works really well for nearly all things within our solar system. But there are things that does not fit. Mercury’s orbit is one famous example. It gave the wrong prediction for the precession of Mercury's closest point to the sun.

Then Einstein developed a theory about space…

And it was about time!

It was a leap forward changing how we viewed the universe and how we would measure it.

It can be argued that this seminal work together with observations from Hubble on Galaxies existing outside of the Milky Way and expanding universe was the beginning of the modern age of cosmology .

Today we are going to get into one topic from relativity directly, gravitational lensing. To be fair to history, the idea that light traveling close to massive objects bends was actually first postulated by Newtonian mechanics of gravity.

And to get out from that enormous weight Dr Georgios Vernardos (Assistant Professor in Physics & Astronomy at Lehman College) has volunteered to come on the podcast. To get from relativity to gravitational lens and to tell the story correctly is hard to do in one episode. So I have planned this one as a pair! So no it is not time dilation due to the weighty subject

Paper at the center the this and the next episode:

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/02/aa53014-24/aa53014-24.html

Links for Whimsical Wavelengths:

Facebook:www.facebook.com/WhimsicalWavelengths

Instagram: @whimsical.wavelengths

Bluesky: @whimsicallambda.bsky.social

Email: whimsical.wavelengths@gmail.com

Patreon: patreon.com/WhimsicalWavelengths