Jupiter’s innermost moon Io experienced three massive volcanic eruptions for two weeks in August 2013, NASA revealed on August 4.
Of the four large “Galilean” moons, Io is said to be around 2,300 miles or 3,630 kilometers across. This Jupiter’s moon is also the solar system’s sole known place that has volcanoes emitting very hot lava similar to that found on Earth. Big eruptions in Io generate an umbrella of debris that goes up into space.
Such occurrence made astronomers speculate that the “outbursts” might be much more usual than they believed. NASA said the “outbursts” can propel material hundreds of miles over the surface.
"We typically expect one huge outburst every one or two years, and they're usually not this bright," Imke de Pater, University of California, Berkeley’s chair and professor of astronomy, said in a statement.
He discovered the first two eruptions on August 15, while the third and among the brightest eruption ever seen on Jupiter’s moon was on August 29. Also, the lead author of one of the two papers on the said eruptions, he said that if only they looked more often, they might see more of such outbursts on Io.
"These new events are in a relatively rare class of eruptions on Io because of their size and astonishingly high thermal emission," also said Ashley Davies, coauthor and long-time colleague of de Pater, in a statement.
A volcanologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA in California, Davies also said that the quantity of energy emitted by such eruptions indicates overflowing lava fountains from fissures at an extremely big volume per second, which form lava flows that rapidly spread over Io’s surface.
Meanwhile, David R. Ciardi, astronomer at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute/California Institute of Technology, likewise saw the occurrence as a good opportunity to connect more closely one end of the solar system evolution or formulation to another.
“Understanding our solar system will help understand all the other systems we are finding and vice versa,” said Ciardi, who also coauthored one of the papers.
The researchers hope that their annual monitoring of the surface of Io will expose the latter’s style of volcanic eruptions, restrict magma composition and map precisely the spatial distribution of potential variations and heat flow as time goes by.
Icarus journal will publish the said papers discussing volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon Io. The papers received funding from NASA’s Outer Planets Research and Planetary Geology and Geophysics Programs and National Science Foundation.
