Space & Astronomy

'Hellish' Io may be home to ocean of magma

By T.K. Randall
September 13, 2015

Image: Io Photographed By NASA's Galileo spacecraft
Credit: (PD) NASA / JPL / University of Arizona With more active volcanism than any other body in the solar system, Io is an undeniably hellish world with a landscape rich in volcanoes capable of spewing molten hot lava 250 miles in to the sky.

The incredible heat needed to fuel this activity is produced by the gravitational tug-of-war between Jupiter and its moons which distort Io in to an oval shape, producing huge amounts of friction.

Like its neighboring moon Europa however Io may also be home to a subterranean ocean, not of water but of molten rock - a vast underground reservoir of magma simmering below its surface.

Scientists now believe that tidal flows within this super-heated ocean could account for the moon's unusual distribution of volcanoes, something that has long proven difficult to explain."This is the first time the amount and distribution of heat produced by fluid tides in a subterranean magma ocean on Io has been studied in detail," said Robert Tyler of the University of Maryland.

"We found that the pattern of tidal heating predicted by our fluid-tide model is able to produce the surface heat patterns that are actually observed on Io."

The findings suggest that subsurface oceans on tidally stressed moons may be a lot more common and last a long longer than previously thought, a fact that could also translate to an increased chance of discovering signs of life on icy moons such as Europa and Enceladus.

As for Io however, a world considered one of the last places anyone would look for alien life, the chances of ever finding anything alive in its hellish oceans of molten rock are practically nil.

Source: NASA.gov

Tags: Io, Magma