Change can be scary. Fortunately, no one is too close to the biggest change in Jupiter’s moon Io, where a new volcano has been spotted on the previously flat surface.
The volcano has numerous lava flows and volcanic deposits covering an area of more than 110 square miles (285 square kilometers). Manhattan, for comparison’s sake, is less than 23 square miles (60 square kilometers), and heats up less than magma during a typical NYC summer. It was spotted by NASA’s Juno spacecraft during a February 2024 flyby from a distance of 1,572 miles (2,530 km).
The images were presented for the first time at the Europlanet Science Congress in Berlin earlier this week. They were taken by Juno’s Junocam, which captures images using light in the spectrum visible to the human eye. Although Io is the most active volcano yet found anywhere in the universe, this particular area on the moon looked flawless in previous images, taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1997.
“Our latest JunoCam images show many changes on Io, including this large, complex volcanic feature that doesn’t appear to have appeared since 1997,” said Michael Ravine, advanced project manager at Malin Space Science Systems, the company that operates the Io. JunoCam, in release.
In the photos, a red stain appears near the volcano, caused by sulfur escaping into the air and settling on the surface. The gray, spherical deposits seen around the area are frozen material from Io’s surface that evaporated along two volcanic lava streams, each stretching more than 62 miles (100 kilometers).
Juno keeps snapping images that make Io seem like a fascinating, or hellish, place. During the same flyby, the spacecraft’s instruments found islands and high mountains inside a real lava lake, not unlike the one Darth Vader built his castle on.
NASA launched the Juno spacecraft in 2011 with the goal of learning more about Jupiter and its moons. Since arriving at Jupiter in 2016, Juno has been on a 53-day orbit around the planet, allowing it to study both the gas giant and its moons, including the volcanic Io and the icy Europa. Data from JunoCam is made available to the public, allowing anyone to create their own images of Jupiter and its moons.
Io is more than 460 million miles (740 million kilometers) from Earth, so scientists have a lot to learn from it. Because of how infrequently it erupts (there are about 400 volcanoes on the moon, which is slightly larger than our Moon), it can be used as a point of comparison with the smaller terrestrial planets. That would allow us to learn more about how such planetary features as mountains form.
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