Juno reveals dozens of lava lakes on Jupiter’s moon Io

Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically energetic physique in the solar diagram, is littered with hundreds of erupting volcanoes. Excessive-resolution pictures now showcase plenty of dozen lava lakes, researchers chronicle in the February Journal of Geophysical Learn: Planets. These lakes are far better than their analogs on Earth, and their building sheds mild on how magma strikes below the outside of Io.

Io’s volcanism — seemingly showcase over the moon’s entire 4.6-billion-year existence — was found when the Voyager spacecraft flew by in 1979. The volcanic activity is triggered by the intense gravitational pulls of Jupiter and nearby moons, which deform Io by tens of meters. “This squeezing is heating the physique,” says Alessandro Mura, a planetary scientist at Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome.

Using infrared pictures from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which has orbited Jupiter since 2016, Mura’s personnel pinpointed better than 40 lava lakes ranging in diameter from about 10 to 100 kilometers. That’s noteworthy better than the lava lakes found on Earth, which tend to measure tens to hundreds of meters at some level of.

Volcanic activity and lava flows are identified to be more crude on varied worlds, says Einat Lev, a volcanologist at Columbia College’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., who was no longer occupied with the analysis. “A kind of planetary flows are noteworthy better” than Earth’s, she says.

Outdated reports bag reported lava lakes on Io nonetheless with simplest minute detail, Mura and colleagues showcase. The researchers found that nearly the entire newly analyzed lava lakes are most popular at their perimeters. This suggests that these lakes are largely capped by a cooler crust of solidified lava.

That idea makes sense given the prerequisites on Io, says Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist on the College of Arizona in Tucson who was no longer occupied with the analysis. “It’s very, very chilly. A crust begins forming trusty away.”

Molten lava remains uncovered on the lake edges seemingly because of of how the lakes bag interplay with their environment, Mura and his colleagues imply. Io’s lava lakes sit down within caldera-admire aspects with steep or even vertical walls, in picture a lake fills or drains, its outer crust scrapes in opposition to those walls, breaking up the crust there and exposing fresh lava.

The findings also shed mild on how magma strikes below Io’s surface and feeds these lakes. No longer one of the analyzed lakes had a scorching role in the center, Mura notes, suggesting that magma doesn’t simply upwell at a lake’s center.

He and his personnel hope to comprehend whether a couple of lava lakes are fed by a classic magma reservoir. If that is the case, varied lakes may trade in size in lockstep. Such observations may reduction showcase small print about the plumbing that powers Io’s volcanism, Mura says. “These may also be a glance below the outside of Io.”