{"id":606414,"date":"2026-07-27T12:17:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T12:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/606414\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T12:17:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T12:17:12","slug":"nasa-detects-intense-heat-beneath-io-jupiters-most-volcanic-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/606414\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA Detects Intense Heat Beneath Io, Jupiter’s Most Volcanic Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

A NASA probe peered beneath the surface of the most volcanic world in the solar system, revealing scorching heat rising from below its crust.<\/p>\n

During two recent close flybys of Jupiter\u2019s moon Io, NASA\u2019s Juno mission measured the temperature below its surface for the first time. The data showed significant heating within the shallow subsurface of the moon that may be rising steadily through a conductive crust.<\/p>\n

The findings were published<\/a> in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, and could help provide new insight for both fiery and icy worlds of the solar system.<\/p>\n

Jupiter\u2019s tortured moon <\/p>\n

Io is covered in hundreds of volcanoes, which spew fountains of lava that constantly refill impact craters on the surface with scorching molten lakes.<\/p>\n

Io\u2019s volcanic activity is the result of a gravitational tug-of-war between Jupiter\u2019s strong pull on the moon and precisely timed gravitational 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 moon\u2019s torment generates an internal heat output that\u2019s much greater than that of Earth\u2019s. Until now, scientists have only known about Io\u2019s heat through infrared observations that sense the temperatures of the top surface.<\/p>\n

Using Juno\u2019s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument, scientists were able to collect data from beneath the surface. The instrument is designed to investigate the dynamics and composition of Jupiter\u2019s deep atmosphere using its ability to peer through the gas giant\u2019s cloud tops.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Juno Microwave Radiometer directly observed Io\u2019s heat output by looking below the surface,\u201d Scott Bolton, Juno\u2019s principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and co-author of the study, said in a statement<\/a>. \u201cThe surprising discovery that we could see below a rocky moon\u2019s surface has important implications for studying Earth\u2019s volcanoes. Juno has taught us that if we look with an MWR-type instrument near a volcano on Earth, we might see a similar signature in the subsurface temperature gradient, providing new information on how terrestrial volcanoes work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heat from below <\/p>\n

On December 30, 2023, and February 3, 2024, the Juno spacecraft came within about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of Io\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe instrument measured Io\u2019s thermal emission at depths ranging from a few inches down to tens of feet. Everywhere we looked, we found the temperature rising by more than 40 degrees Fahrenheit just several feet into the surface\u2014a gradient far steeper than solar heating alone can explain,\u201d Shannon Brown, the paper\u2019s lead author at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.<\/p>\n

The scientists behind the study interpret Io\u2019s internal heat through two possible explanations. Heat could be rising steadily through a conductive crust. This type of background heat flow may be relatively gentle on a local scale, similar to a small nightlight glowing under every square yard, according to NASA. When it occurs across the entire moon, it represents a release of energy up to 30 times Earth\u2019s average.<\/p>\n

The heat signal could also be coming from cooling lava flows, which are capped by roughly 30 to 35 feet (9 to 11 meters) of solidified crust that cover about 10% of the moon\u2019s surface at any given time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIo provides a unique window into learning how tidal heating works throughout the cosmos, a fundamental process that provides energy and heat to worlds that are far from their parent star,\u201d Bolton said. \u201cThis process can not only create the most volcanic body in the solar system, in the case of Io, but also fuels the subsurface oceans on the moons of giant planets, such as Europa and Ganymede.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUp until this point we could only observe the heat escaping at the surface or through eruptions. Now we can characterize how the heat is moving from the interior toward the surface,\u201d Bolton added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A NASA probe peered beneath the surface of the most volcanic world in the solar system, revealing scorching…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606415,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[77],"tags":[18,19,17,10212,2663,133,8913],"class_list":["post-606414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-juno","tag-jupiter","tag-science","tag-spacecraft"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606414","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=606414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}