Terrible volcanoes of Io

2002/11/19 Elhuyar Zientzia

• Astronomia

Io is the colourful moon of Jupiter, the body with the most volcanic activity in the solar system. Its volcanoes have already been seen before, most of them in photographs sent by the Galileo probe. But it was that of the Galileo probe, which now uses the Earth telescopes.

Keck II is a 10 meter telescope with flexible mirrors to correct distortions produced by the Earth's atmosphere. It is located in the Mauna Ke of Hawaii, also a volcano, with which they have obtained images with infrared rays.

The upper figures were held on February 20, 2001 and the eruption began. The lower ones are two days later and calculate that the eruption covered 1,900 km2. In addition, they consider that at the time of the reception of the images the lava had at least 1,200 °C.