NASA Detects Most Powerful Volcanic Eruption on Jupiter’s Io
- Jupiter's moon Io is covered in hundreds of volcanoes, which spew fountains of lava that constantly refill impact craters on its surface with scorching molten lakes.
- NASA's Juno mission detected a volcanic hot spot in the southern hemisphere of Jupiter's moon, marking the most energetic eruption ever detected on Io or anywhere else in...
- "This is the most powerful volcanic event ever recorded on the most volcanic world in our solar system-so that's really saying something," Scott Bolton, a researcher at the...
Jupiter’s moon Io is covered in hundreds of volcanoes, which spew fountains of lava that constantly refill impact craters on its surface with scorching molten lakes. A recent discovery of extreme volcanic activity on teh Jovian moon tops any eruption previously detected on Io, proving that this chaotic world knows no bounds.
NASA’s Juno mission detected a volcanic hot spot in the southern hemisphere of Jupiter’s moon, marking the most energetic eruption ever detected on Io or anywhere else in the solar system beyond Earth The volcanic hot spot spans 40,000 square miles (100,000 square kilometers), erupting with six times the amount of energy produced by all of the world’s power plants combined.
“This is the most powerful volcanic event ever recorded on the most volcanic world in our solar system-so that’s really saying something,” Scott Bolton, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and principal investigator of the Juno mission, said in a statement.
Details of the discovery were recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM
Fountain of lava
Juno has been orbiting Jupiter for nearly a decade.The spacecraft’s extended mission, which began in 2021, has allowed scientists to study jupiter’s moons Io, Europa, ganymede, and Callisto.
Juno flies over the same region of Io once every two orbits. During its latest flyby on December 27, 2024, the spacecraft flew to within about 46,200 miles (74,400 kilometers) of the moon and focused its infrared instrument on the southern hemisphere.
Using Juno’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument, contributed by the Italian Space agency, scientists detected an event of extreme infrared radiance. The total power value of the new hot spot’s radiance measured well above 80 trillion watts.
“What makes the event even more unusual is that it did not involve a single volcano, but multiple active sources that lit up concurrently, increasing their brightness by more than a thousand times compared to typical levels,” Alessandro Mura, a researcher at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), and lead author of the paper, said in an emailed statement. “This perfect synchrony suggests that it was a single enormous eruptive event, propagating through the subsurface for hundreds of kilometers.”