Using a telescope on a mountain in Arizona, scientists have managed to capture snapshots of Jupiter’s active moon Io – and these images are so detailed they rival images of the world from space.
To capture these images, the team used a camera called SHARK-VIS, recently installed on the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mount Graham in Arizona; the new images outline features on Io’s surface just 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide – a resolution previously only possible with spacecraft studying Jupiter. “This is equivalent to taking a picture of an object the size of a dime from a distance of 100 miles (161 kilometers),” said a statement from the University of Arizona, which operates the telescope.
In fact, the new photos of Io are so complex that scientists were able to distinguish overlapping deposits of lava spewed by two active volcanoes just south of the moon’s equator. An LBT image of Io taken in early January shows a dark red ring of sulfur around Pele, a prominent volcano that routinely spews plumes the size of Alaska up to 186 miles (300 kilometers) above Io’s surface. That ring appears to be partially hidden by white debris (representing frozen sulfur dioxide) from a neighboring volcano called Pillan Patera, which is known to erupt less frequently. In April, Pele’s red ring again appears almost complete in images taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft during its shortest flyby of the moon in two decades, revealing a new dump of erupted material by the active volcano.
Related: NASA reveals ‘glass-smooth lake of cooling lava’ on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io
“It’s a kind of competition between the Pillan eruption and the Pele eruption, how much and how fast each is dumping,” co-author Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, said in another statement. “Once Pillan stops completely, it will be covered again by Pele’s red deposits.”
Io’s volcanic eruptions, including those of Pele and Pillan Patera, are caused by frictional heat created deep within the moon as a result of a gravitational battle between Jupiter and its two other nearby moons Europa and Ganymede. Monitoring Io’s volcanic activity, which has likely plagued the world for most (if not all) of its 4.57 billion years of existence, could help scientists figure out how the eruptions are affecting the moon’s surface as a whole have formed.
Surface changes on Io, 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 series of outbursts from Pele and Pillan Patera was also observed by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft during its tour of the Jupiter system between 1995 and 2003.
But prior to the installation of the new camera on the LBT last year, “such resurfacing events were impossible to observe from Earth,” said co-author Ashley Davies, chief scientist for planetary geosciences at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory , in the study. rack. That’s because infrared images from ground-based telescopes can detect hotspots that indicate ongoing volcanic eruptions, but their resolution is not enough to identify the precise locations of eruptions and surface changes such as fresh plume deposits, scientists say.
“While these types of resurfacing events are common on Io, few have been observed due to the rarity of spacecraft visits and the previously low spatial resolution available from ground-based telescopes,” Davies and her colleagues wrote in a new study published Tuesday . June 4) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “SHARK-VIS ushers in a new era in planetary imaging.”
SHARK-VIS, built by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics at the Rome Astronomical Observatory, achieves its unprecedented sharpness by working together with LBT’s adaptive optics system, which shifts its dual mirrors in real time to compensate for blur caused by atmospheric turbulence . Algorithms then select and combine the best images, resulting in the sharpest portraits of Io ever possible with 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 the spatial resolution of SHARK,” Davies told Astronomy. “Coincidentally, the first time we observed Io, we discovered that a major change had indeed occurred.”
Originally posted on Stempo.com.