Details of the discovery were recently published<\/a> in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.<\/p>\n Juno has been orbiting Jupiter for nearly a decade. The spacecraft\u2019s extended mission, which began in 2021, has allowed scientists to study Jupiter\u2019s moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Using Juno\u2019s 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\u2019s radiance measured well above 80 trillion watts.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat makes the event even more extraordinary is that it did not involve a single volcano, but multiple active sources that lit up simultaneously, increasing their brightness by more than a thousand times compared to typical levels,\u201d Alessandro Mura, a researcher at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), and lead author of the paper, said in an emailed statement. \u201cThis perfect synchrony suggests that it was a single enormous eruptive event, propagating through the subsurface for hundreds of kilometers.\u201d<\/p>\n The data not only suggests that this is the most intense volcanic eruption ever recorded on Io, it also hints that there\u2019s a massive chamber system of interconnected magma reservoirs beneath the moon\u2019s surface. This interwoven system can be activated simultaneously to produce a single, planetary-wide energy release. \u201cWe have evidence what we detected is actually a few closely spaced hot spots that emitted at the same time,\u201d Mura said.<\/p>\n JunoCam, the spacecraft\u2019s visible light camera, also captured the event. The team compared images captured by JunoCam from the mission\u2019s last two flybys of Io in April and October of 2024 with the latest ones taken in December 2024, discovering significant changes in the surface coloring around the area where the hot spot was detected.<\/p>\n Tormented world <\/p>\n Io\u2019s volcanic activity is the result of a gravitational tug-of-war between Jupiter\u2019s gravitational pull on the moon and precisely timed pulls from neighboring moons Ganymede and Europa. The tortured moon is the subject of extreme tidal forces, causing its surface to bulge up and down by as much as 330 feet (100 meters) at a time, according to NASA<\/a>.<\/p>\n The tidal forces generate a tremendous amount of heat within Io, thereby causing its liquid subsurface crust to seek relief from the pressure by escaping to the surface. The surface of Io is constantly being renewed, as molten lava refills the moon\u2019s impact craters, smoothing out the moon with fresh liquid rock.<\/p>\n The recently detected eruption will likely leave a long-lasting impact on Io. The team behind Juno will use the mission\u2019s upcoming flyby of the moon on March 3 to look at the hot spot again and make note of any changes to the landscape surrounding it.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile it is always great to witness events that rewrite the record books, this new hot spot can potentially do much more,\u201d Bolton said. \u201cThe intriguing feature could improve our understanding of volcanism not only on Io but on other worlds as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jupiter\u2019s moon Io is covered in hundreds of volcanoes, which spew fountains of lava that constantly refill impact…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309096,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[270],"tags":[18,19,17,10212,2663,133,10214,451,30480],"class_list":{"0":"post-309095","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-juno","12":"tag-jupiter","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-solar-system","15":"tag-space","16":"tag-volcanoes"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115976185011999485","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309095\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1-pia26527-io-eruption-ir-final.jpg\")
The massive hotspot can be seen just to the right of Io\u2019s south pole in this annotated image taken by the JIRAM infrared imager aboard NASA\u2019s Juno on December 27, 2024.
Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/SwRI\/ASI\/INAF\/JIRAM Fountain of lava <\/p>\n![\"Images](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/e-pia26526-io-eruption-junocam.jpg\")
Images of Io captured in 2024 by the JunoCam show significant and visible surface changes near the moon\u2019s south pole. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/SwRI\/MSSS Image processing by Jason Perry <\/p>\n