Juno reveals dozens of lake lakes on Jupiter’s moon io

Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanic body active in the solar system, is filled with hundreds of explosive volcanoes. High -resolution images now discover several tens of lakes, researchers report in February Geophysical Research Newspaper: Planets. These lakes are much larger than their analogs on Earth, and their structure sheds light on how magma moves under the surface of IO.

The volcanic of Io-cannon present over the entire existence of 4.6 billion years of the moon-was discovered when the Voyager spaceship flew until 1979. Volcanic activity is caused by the great gravitational attractions of Jupiter and nearby moons, which deform from tens of meters. “This squeezing is warming the body,” says Alessandro Mura, a planetary scientist at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy in Rome.

Using infrared images from NASA’s Juno spaceship, which has orbited Jupiter since 2016, the Mura team showed more than 40 lakes ranging from about 10 to 100 kilometers. This is much larger than the lava lakes found on Earth, which tend to measure tens in hundreds of meters throughout.

Volcanic activity and lava flows are known to be the most extreme in other worlds, says Einat Lev, a volcanologist at the Lamont-doherty Observatory of Columbia University in Palisades, NY, which was not involved in the research. “Many planetary flows are much larger” than that of Earth, she says.

Previous studies have reported lake lakes in IO but with limited details, marks Mura and colleagues. Researchers found that most newly analyzed laundry lakes are hotter in their perimeters. This suggests that these lakes are largely captured by a cooler crust of hardened lava.

This idea makes sense given the conditions in IO, says Alfred Mcewen, a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who was not involved in the research. “It’s very very cold. A crust begins to form immediately. “

The melted lava remains exposed to the ends of the lake probably because of the way the lakes propose to their surroundings, Mura and his colleagues propose. Io lava lakes sit within features similar to boilers with steep or even vertical walls, so while a lake fills or drains, its outer crust scraps against those walls, breaking the crust there and exposing fresh lava.

The findings also shed light on how magma moves under the surface of IO and feeds these lakes. None of the analyzed lakes had a hot spot in the middle, Mura notes, suggesting that Magma did not just try in a lake center.

He and his team hope to understand if the numerous lava lakes are fed by an ordinary magma reservoir. In that case, different lakes may vary in size in the jam. Such observations can help detect details about the plumbing that strengthens the volcano of IO, says Mura. “These can be a brief appearance below the surface of IO.”