Massive Eruptions on Io Three massive volcanic eruptions occurred on Jupiters moon Io within a two-week period last August, leading astronomers to speculate that these presumed rare outbursts. These outbursts can send material hundreds of miles above the surface, might be much more common than astronomers thought. The observations were made using the W. M. Keck Observatory and Gemini Observatory, both near the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. We typically expect one huge outburst every one or two years, and theyre 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 innermost of Jupiters four large Galilean moons, is about 2,300 miles across, and, aside from Earth, is the only known place in the solar system with volcanoes erupting extremely hot lava like that seen on Earth. Because of Ios low gravity, large volcanic eruptions produce an umbrella of debris that rises high into space. De Paters long-time colleague and coauthor Ashley Davies, a volcanologist with NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., said that the recent eruptions resemble past events that spewed tens of cubic miles of lava over hundreds of square miles in a short period of time. 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. All three events, including the largest, most powerful eruption of the trio on 29 Aug. 2013, were likely characterized by curtains of fire, as lava blasted out of fissures perhaps several miles long. The papers, one with lead author Katherine de Kleer, a UC Berkeley graduate student, and coauthored by UC Berkeley research astronomer Mate Adamkovics, and the other coauthored by Adamkovics and David R. Ciardi of Caltechs NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, have been accepted for publication in the journal Icarus.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 16:59:00 +0000
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