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- "We believe that it erupted in fountains from long fissures on Io's surface, which were over ten-thousand-times more powerful than the lava fountains during the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, Iceland
- "We believe that it erupted in fountains from long fissures on Io's surface, which were over ten-thousand-times more powerful than the lava fountains during the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, Iceland
Jupiter’s moon Io had a hellish two weeks last August, as volcanic eruptions ripped across its surface, sending fiendishly hot “curtains of fire” hurtling into space.
Over 14 days, Io had three massive volcanic outbursts that sent umbrellas of debris hundreds of miles above the surface and high into surrounding space, events that were previously thought to be rare.
"We typically expect one huge outburst every one or two years, and they're usually not this bright," said Imke de Pater, professor and chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of one of two papers describing the eruptions.
"Here we had three extremely bright outbursts, which suggest that if we looked more frequently we might see many more of them on Io."
Io, the closest to the planet of Jupiter’s four large “Galilean” moons, is around the same size of Earth’s Moon and is the only known place in the Solar System with volcanoes of extremely hot lava like those on our own planet. Unlike Earth though, Io has low gravity, so eruptions spew masses of material much farther.
The most recent explosions match past events that plumed tens of cubic miles of lava over hundreds of square miles of moon in a short period, according to NASA Jet Propulsion Lab volcanologist Ashley Davies.
"These new events are in a relatively rare class of eruptions on Io because of their size and astonishingly high thermal emission," he said. "The amount of energy being emitted by these eruptions implies lava fountains gushing out of fissures at a very large volume per second, forming lava flows that quickly spread over the surface of Io."
The third eruption, and the most extreme one, was captured by the Gemini Observatory exploding from miles-long fissures on Io’s surface.
"At the time we observed the event, an area of newly-exposed lava on the order of tens of square kilometres was visible," said University of Berkeley astronomer Katherine de Kleer, author of the second paper.
The spate of seismic activity was also monitored by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility, the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Japanese HISAKI (SPRINT-A) spacecraft, which is in orbit around Earth.
Studying Io provides scientists with something of a volcanic laboratory, helping them to examine the processes that helped to shape the surfaces of terrestrial planets and moons in the Solar System, including Earth.
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