It is not a big moon relative to a few of its neighbors, however Jupiter’s moon Io may be very energetic, with a whole lot of volcanoes erupting lava plumes dozens of miles above its floor, in response to NASA. Infrared know-how aboard the house company’s Juno probe mapped two such eruptions in February, returning helpful knowledge about mysterious occasions beneath Io’s floor. Researchers share their insights on the matter a dissertation Launched final week.
About 2,400 miles away, the spacecraft’s Jupiter Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument “confirmed that Io Your entire floor is roofed by lava lakes in crater-like options.” For astrophysics. On Earth, a caldera is a crater shaped by the collapse of a volcano. Io is a few quarter the diameter of Earth and simply barely bigger than the moon.
“Within the space of ​​Io’s floor for which we have now probably the most full knowledge, we estimate that about 3 p.c is roofed by certainly one of these lava lakes,” Mura mentioned. Juno’s JIRAM software comes from the Italian house company Agenzia Spaziale Italiana.
Mulla, lead creator of the Io paper, mentioned the probe’s flyby uncovered the commonest sort of volcanic exercise on Jupiter’s hottest moon – “big lava lakes the place magma flows up and down.”
He added: “The lava crust was compelled by the lake partitions, forming the lava rings typical of Hawaiian lava lakes. These partitions may be a whole lot of meters excessive, which explains why no magma overflow is normally noticed.
Researchers are nonetheless poring over knowledge collected from Juno’s flybys of Io (February 2024 and December 2023).
