#Io moon dimensions full

( Explore the many intriguing moons of the solar system in our interactive atlas.) Volcanoes don’t seem to be in the right places, the brightest eruptions seem largely confined to just one hemisphere, and Loki Patera-a 8,100-square-mile depression filled with lava-steadfastly refuses to play by anyone’s rules. The research also confirms that Io is even stranger and more difficult to explain than anyone thought. Their work, recently published in The Astronomical Journal, reminds us how far we’ve come since Voyager delivered those first grainy images of plumes on Io. Now, scientists pouring over five years’ worth of images taken from the top of a Hawaiian volcano have unveiled the most detailed atlas yet of this unusual moon. Io’s powerful eruptions can produce plumes of epic proportions, sometimes reaching heights of 300 miles. Some of its hundreds of fiery craters are many times more expansive than our largest cities. As it stands, de Kleer, Skrutskie and other stargazers will have to wait until the next alingment between the two moons, which should come in 2021.Roughly 40 years ago, the Voyager 1 spacecraft sailed past one of Jupiter’s large moons, and it revealed something amazing: The rocky moon, called Io, is a volcanic champion, featuring the first erupting volcanoes seen anywhere other than Earth. If mankind ever gets there, it will also provide a great chance to look at Loki Patera up-close. The moons of Jupiter have been of interest in recent years, with Europa emerging as one of the best candidates for life outside of Earth. These results give us a glimpse into the complex plumbing system under Loki Patera.' 'There must be differences in the magma supply to the two halves of the patera, and whatever is triggering the start of overturn manages to trigger both halves at nearly the same time but not exactly.

'The velocity of overturn is also different on the two sides of the island, which may have something to do with the composition of the magma or the amount of dissolved gas in bubbles in the magma,' de Kleer says. The youngest lava is in the lower right, having overturned most recently, approximately 75 days before the observations. It takes around 75 days on the eastern and in between 180 and 230 days on the western end.Īn infrared map of Loki Patera.

There's a solid volcanic island in the middle of Loki, which, it turns out, is a dividing line: the eastern and western sides of the sea expose new magma to the surface at different speeds. Katherine de Kleer and her team also determined how recently new magma had been exposed at the surface of Loki, a process called overturn. The wealth of data within those ten seconds allowed the astronomers to create a two-dimensional thermal map of Loki Patera with a resolution ten times sharper than would be possible otherwise.

#Io moon dimensions full

Katherine de KleerĮuropa covered Loki Patera for a full ten seconds, and there was 'so much infrared light available that we could slice the observations into one-eighth-second intervals during which the edge of Europa advanced only a few kilometers across Io's surface,' says co-author Michael Skrutskie, of the University of Virginia, who led the development of the infrared camera used for this study.

Europa passing in front of Io, allowing for the infrared map to be created.