It’s not a giant moon relative to a few of its neighbors, however Jupiter’s Io is exceedingly energetic, with volcanoes by the a whole lot spewing lava plumes dozens of miles above its floor, per NASA. Infrared tech aboard the area company’s Juno probe mapped two such eruptions in February, returning beneficial information on the mysterious happenings beneath Io’s floor. Researchers shared their insights on the matter in a paper revealed final week.
From round 2,400 miles away, the probe’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument “revealed that the entire floor of Io is roofed by lava lakes contained in caldera-like options,” defined Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator from Rome’s Nationwide Institute for Astrophysics. On Earth, a caldera is a crater shaped by a collapsing volcano. Io is a few quarter the scale of Earth by diameter, and only a bit larger than Earth’s moon.
“Within the area of Io’s floor wherein we now have essentially the most full information, we estimate about 3% of it’s lined by one in all these molten lava lakes,” stated Mura. Juno’s JIRAM device got here by way of Italy’s area company, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana.
In response to Mura, lead writer of the Io paper, the probe’s flybys expose the most typical kind of volcanism on Jupiter’s hottest moon — “huge lakes of lava the place magma goes up and down.”
He added, “The lava crust is pressured to interrupt towards the partitions of the lake, forming the everyday lava ring seen in Hawaiian lava lakes. The partitions are probably a whole lot of meters excessive, which explains why magma is mostly not noticed spilling out.”
Researchers are nonetheless poring over the info collected by Juno’s Io flybys, which occurred in February 2024 and December 2023.
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