Using a telescope located on a mountain in Arizona, scientists have managed to take pictures of Jupiter’s active moon Io – and these images are so detailed that they even rival pictures of the world taken from space.
To capture these images, the team used a camera, called SHARK-VIS, that was recently installed on the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) located on Arizona’s Mount Graham; The new images delineate features on Io’s surface up to 50 miles (80 kilometers) across – a resolution previously only possible with the spacecraft studying Jupiter. “This is equivalent to taking a picture of an object 100 miles (161 kilometers) in size,” according to one STATEMENT from the University of Arizona, which manages the telescope.
Connected: NASA’s Juno probe captures stunning high-resolution images of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa
The new photos of Io are, in fact, so intricate that scientists can make out overlapping deposits of lava erupted from two active volcanoes south of the moon’s equator. An LBT image of Io taken in early January shows a dark red ring of sulfur around Pele, which is a prominent volcano that routinely spews plumes the size of Alaska up to 186 miles (300 kilometers ) above the surface of Io. That ring appears partially obscured by white debris (representing frozen sulfur dioxide) from a neighboring volcano called Pillan Patera, which is known to erupt less frequently. By April, Pele’s red ring was once again seen nearly complete in images taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft during its closest flyby of the Moon in two decades, revealing a new clump of material. erupted from the active volcano.
“It’s kind of a competition between the Pillan eruption and the Pele eruption, how much and how fast each is deposited,” study co-author Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, said in another. STATEMENT. “Once Pillan stops completely, then it will be covered again by Pele’s red deposits.”
Io’s volcanic eruptions, including those from Pele and Pillan Patera, are driven by frictional heat generated deep inside the moon as a result of a gravitational pull between Jupiter and its two other nearby moons Europa and Ganymede. Monitoring Io’s volcanic activity, which is likely stripped the world for most (if not all) of its 4.57 billion years of existence, it can help scientists learn how eruptions shaped the surface of the Moon as a whole.
Surface changes on Io, which is actually the most volcanically active body in the solar system, have been recorded since the Voyager spacecraft first detected volcanic activity on the moon in 1979. A similar eruption sequence from Pele and Pillan Patera was observed also by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft during its tour of the Jupiter system between 1995 and 2003.
However, before the new camera was installed on the LBT last year, “such reappearance events were impossible to observe from Earth,” the statement said. That’s because while infrared images from ground-based telescopes can sniff out hotspots that indicate ongoing volcanic eruptions, their resolution isn’t sufficient to pinpoint the exact locations of eruptions and surface changes like plume deposits. fresh, say scientists.
“Although this type of reappearance event may be common on Io, few have been detected due to the rarity of spacecraft visits and the previously low spatial resolution available from Earth-based telescopes,” Davies and her colleagues wrote. in a new one. STUDY published Tuesday (June 4) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “SHARK-VIS ushers in a new era in planetary imaging.”
SHARK-VIS, which was built by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics at the Astronomical Observatory of Rome, achieves its unprecedented sharpness by working together with the LBT’s adaptive optics system, which moves its twin mirrors in real time to compensate blurring caused by atmospheric turbulence. . Algorithms then select and combine the best images, resulting in the sharpest portraits of Io that can be achieved using an Earth-based telescope.
“Io was chosen as a test case because it was known to exhibit dramatic surface changes that would be detectable at SHARK’s spatial resolution,” Davies. said about Astronomy. “As it happens, the first time we observed Io, we found that a big change had indeed occurred.”