Scientists Have Unveiled The Mystery Of How Jupiter’s Most Violent Moon Became So Volcanically Active
For 44 years, it was a mystery as to how Jupiter’s most violent moon, Io, became so volcanically active. It is the most volcanic body in our entire solar system. But now, NASA scientists have finally uncovered the secrets of this moon’s activity.
According to NASA, Io is just slightly bigger than Earth’s moon, with a diameter of 2,237 miles. It has an estimated 400 volcanoes that blast lava, and the plumes from their eruptions can stretch for miles into space. They can even be spotted on Earth when looking through large telescopes.
The moon was first discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei, but its volcanism was not identified until 1979 by Linda Morabito, a scientist who was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion-Laboratory at the time. The evidence was in an image captured by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft.
“Since Morabito’s discovery, planetary scientists have wondered how the volcanoes were fed from the lava underneath the surface,” said Scott Bolton, the lead investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio for NASA’s Juno spacecraft.
“Was there a shallow ocean of white-hot magma fueling the volcanoes, or was their source more localized?”
In 2011, the Juno spacecraft was launched to study Jupiter and its moons. In 2023 and 2024, the spacecraft made two close flybys of Io. It got within 930 miles of the moon’s bubbling surface.
The data that Juno gathered definitely provided some valuable insight into the moon’s activity. Scientists were also able to measure Io’s gravity: Io orbits Jupiter at an average distance of 262,000 miles. Once every 42.5 hours, it completes its elliptical cycle.
The moon’s distance from Jupiter varies due to the shape of its orbit, and so does Jupiter’s gravitational pull. That means the moon routinely experiences tidal flexing, which is a process that involves the moon being squeezed and released like a stress ball.
The constant tidal flexing creates intense heat and melts sections of Io’s interior. Previously, it was thought that Io’s interior contained a large magma ocean underneath its surface because of tidal flexing. However, the latest research suggests that no such ocean exists.
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Instead, the NASA team proposed that Io has a mostly solid interior, and each of its volcanoes has its own subterranean chamber of boiling magma.
“Juno’s discovery that tidal forces do not always create global magma oceans does more than prompt us to rethink what we know about Io’s interior,” said Ryan Park, a co-investigator and supervisor of the Solar System Dynamics Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The new findings can help the team better understand planetary development and evolution. They also have implications for Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, and another one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa.
The details of the study were published in the journal Nature.
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