Io the strangest moon in the solar system.

In the image we see the shadows of the mountains, these triangular shadows, some of these mountains, some of the highest, and the curious thing is that they are not united with mountain ranges as they would be here on Earth, but rather they are isolated, they are like islands in amid the plains of sulfur and volcanic ash, we do not know very well how they are formed, why they suddenly rise 10,000 meters high out of nowhere without being linked to a mountain range or some other geological phenomenon is something very strange.

Io contrasts with its other sister moons that are covered in ice such as the moon Europa or the moon Ganymede or Callisto. Even those moons have we know that they have enormous oceans of liquid water under their icy crust, but on Io we will not find any water, nor ice, it is believed that io is the driest object in the solar system due to all this volcanic activity, we can even find water ice in the craters of mercury, which are in permanent darkness but not in io.

All this volcanic activity comes from the action of Jupiter's tidal forces, that is, from Jupiter's large satellites, of all of them the one that is closest to the gas giant, to this we must add the gravitational action of Europa and Ganymede , two other satellites that bother Poor Io with an orbital resonance, which ends up adding all these gravitational forces and causes that in each orbit of Io, which lasts approximately 42 hours, The core of IO is stretched and squeezed and stretched and squeezed and heated and this is what fuels volcanic activity.

We already knew all this, I have explained it in a rough way, in a simple way, but the news that has now been presented in the scientific magazine nature according to NASA, the scientists of the Juno mission have discovered something more strange about io, it is I suspected that all this volcanism came from an immense ocean of magma that was under the crust, it seems logical, so much heat, so much volcano, the crust had to be very thin and underneath there would have to be only magma, it turns out not, it turns out that volcanoes of io are probably each fed by their own hot magma chamber there is no global magma ocean and this is quite rare.

This was known thanks to the last flyby that the Juno Probe made in February 2024, it approached within 100 km of the surface. It did a previous one in 2023, but in 2024 we had more data about it and what was done, among other things, what was done. was to measure the local gravity of io and that analysis was where we learned that under the crust of io there is no global magma ocean, all these volcanoes have some repercussion In other cases, it turns out yes, because even Now it is evidently not a place to live, it is not a place where life can arise, there is too much volcanic commotion, too much heat, too much explosion, too much sulfur, but this research is about tidal forces and this is quite important because it can have impact on the calculations we have made on other moons such as the moon Europa.

Europa's moon also has internal heat due to the same effect of tidal forces, what happens is that since it is a little further from Jupiter, the effect is much smaller, so it can maintain an icy crust, but yes. Under the surface we know that there is water, there is an ocean of liquid water thanks to that gravitational pull of tidal forces, what is happening is that now with this research we are realizing that tidal forces can act in different and different ways as we thought, so perhaps we should rethink what that internal ocean of the moon Europa and other internal oceans of other icy moons that are also heated thanks to tidal forces may be like.

It could be interesting, it could give us a clue about how these oceans could be nourished by material substances, elements that are essential for life or it could be the opposite, it could tell us that they are dead oceans without substances, without elements, researchers are thinking both. options, but I think the first one is more like remembering that, for example, the red lines on the moon, Europe, we know are red because they are cracks and in those cracks the water that is inside Europa comes out to the outside and when it comes out not only The water comes out, the substances it carries also come out. That water and specifically the salts, we know that with Jupiter's radiation they end up browning, they literally end up taking on that red color, which is why the lines of Europa.

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