Volcano on ‘tormented’ moon has biggest ever 80,000,000,000,000-watt eruption
The biggest ever volcanic eruption in our solar system has been recorded, and it puts Eyjafjallajökull in the shade.
While the Icelandic eruption managed to ground flights across Europe in 2010, it didn’t quite have the force of every power station in the world operating at once.
Nasa’s Juno spacecraft detected a huge lake of fire on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io, which at around 100,000 square kilometres is even bigger than the previous record holder, Loki Patera, which is also on the volatile moon.
The moon is so active because it orbits close to Jupiter, whose massive gravitational pull sends it this way and that way and mangles any chance of peace.
Scott Bolton, the spacecraft’s primary investigator, said every flyby of the ‘tormented’ moon exceeded expectations, but the data from this latest one ‘really blew our minds’.
He said: ‘This is the most powerful volcanic event ever recorded on the most volcanic world in our solar system — so that’s really saying something.’
It is thought to have the power of ‘well over’ 80 trillion watts.
The hotspot was detected near Io’s South Pole, using the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument, contributed by the Italian Space Agency.
It’s not the only fantastic discovery by Juno, which previously sent back stunning images of an eclipse across the surface of Jupiter and psychedelic footage of how the gas giant’s clouds move.
Io is only around the size of our own Moon, but you’d be much less likely to want to land there.
Orbiting around our solar system’s biggest planet once every 42.5 hours, it is ‘relentlessly squeezed’ as it gets closer and further away which melts portions of its interior, sending up an ‘endless series of lava plumes and ash venting into its atmosphere from the estimated 400 volcanoes that riddle its surface,’ Nasa said.
Juno has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016, after taking five years to make the 2.8billion km journey from Earth, and has been sending back information on the gas giant as well as its four moons.
The latest images were taken on a flyby of Io on December 27, when it wasn’t even particularly close in comparison to previous visits, at 46,200 miles from the moon’s surface.
Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator, said the massive hotspot was ‘so strong that it saturated our detector’.
He added: ‘We have evidence what we detected is actually a few closely spaced hot spots that emitted at the same time, suggestive of a subsurface vast magma chamber system.’
Juno will go back for another flyby on March 3 and will look out for the hotspot again, sending back information that help us better understand volcanoes on other worlds too.
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