NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Delivered A Spectacular Aerial View From Io, Including Mountains And A Lava Lake
Image credits: NASA
Jupiter is the 5th planet from the sun and the second brightest planet in the night sky, after Venus. It’s so big that we could fit more than 1,300 Earths inside, and is known as a very chaotic and stormy place – some of the winds can be as fast as 335 miles an hour at the equator.
The astronomer Galileo Galilei was the first one who, in 1610, spotted what he thought were four small stars tagging along with Jupiter. It turned out they were the four largest moons, now known as the Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
The most volcanic one, Jupiter’s moon Io, has been getting attention from scientists for decades. They studied its atmospheric chemistry to work out how long it might have taken for countless eruptions to shift its composition from an ancient starting point and found out that it has been spewing lava since the dawn of the solar system, about 4.57 billion years ago.
Truly astonishing is that through volcanic outgassing and atmospheric erosion, Io loses as much as three tons of material every single second to space. “One could argue that Io’s losing its mass like a comet,” said Apurva Oza, a planetary astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Jupiter is the 5th planet from the sun and the second brightest planet in the night sky, after Venus. It’s so big that we could fit more than 1,300 Earths inside, and is known as a very chaotic and stormy place – some of the winds can be as fast as 335 miles an hour at the equator.
The astronomer Galileo Galilei was the first one who, in 1610, spotted what he thought were four small stars tagging along with Jupiter. It turned out they were the four largest moons, now known as the Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
The most volcanic one, Jupiter’s moon Io, has been getting attention from scientists for decades. They studied its atmospheric chemistry to work out how long it might have taken for countless eruptions to shift its composition from an ancient starting point and found out that it has been spewing lava since the dawn of the solar system, about 4.57 billion years ago.
Truly astonishing is that through volcanic outgassing and atmospheric erosion, Io loses as much as three tons of material every single second to space. “One could argue that Io’s losing its mass like a comet,” said Apurva Oza, a planetary astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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26 May 2024
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