It’s not a giant moon relative to a few of its neighbors, however Jupiter’s Io is exceedingly lively, with volcanoes by the a whole bunch spewing lava plumes dozens of miles above its floor, per NASA. Infrared tech aboard the house company’s Juno probe mapped two such eruptions in February, returning precious knowledge on the mysterious happenings beneath Io’s floor. Researchers shared their insights on the matter in a paper printed 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 couple of quarter the dimensions of Earth by diameter, and only a bit larger than Earth’s moon.
“Within the area of Io’s floor wherein we’ve got essentially the most full knowledge, we estimate about 3% of it’s coated by one in all these molten lava lakes,” stated Mura. Juno’s JIRAM device got here through Italy’s house company, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana.
In keeping with Mura, lead creator of the Io paper, the probe’s flybys expose the most typical sort of volcanism on Jupiter’s hottest moon — “huge lakes of lava the place magma goes up and down.”
He added, “The lava crust is compelled to interrupt towards the partitions of the lake, forming the everyday lava ring seen in Hawaiian lava lakes. The partitions are probably a whole bunch 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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