Using a telescope perched on a mountain in Arizona, scientists have managed to capture images of Jupiter’s active moon Io – and these images are so detailed that they even rival images of the world taken from space.
To capture these views, the team used a camera called SHARK-VIS that was recently installed on the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) located on Arizona’s Mt. Graham; the new images outline features on Io’s surface 80 kilometers across—a resolution previously only possible with spacecraft studying Jupiter. “This is equivalent to taking a picture of a dime-sized object from 100 miles (161 kilometers) away,” it said declaration from the University of Arizona, which manages the telescope.
Related: NASA’s Juno probe captures fascinating high-resolution images of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa
The new images of Io are so complex, in fact, that scientists were able to make out overlapping deposits of lava spewed by 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, a prominent volcano that routinely spews plumes the size of Alaska up to 186 miles (300 kilometers) above Io’s surface. This ring appears to be partially obscured 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 can be seen almost entirely again in images taken by NASA’s Juno probe during its closest flyby of the moon in two decades, revealing a fresh dump of material blasted 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 paper. declaration. “Once the Pillan comes to a complete stop, then it will be covered in Pele’s red deposits again.
Volcanic eruptions on Io, including those of Pele and Pillan Patera, are driven by frictional heat generated deep within the moon due to the gravitational tug between Jupiter and its two other nearby moons, Europa and Ganymede. Monitoring Io’s volcanic activity, which is likely tore the world apart for most (if not all) of its 4.57 billion years of existence 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 probe first detected volcanic activity on the moon in 1979. A similar sequence of eruptions from Pele and Pillan Patera were also observed by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft during its travels through the Jupiter system between 1995 and 2003.
However, before the new camera was installed on the LBT last year, “it was not possible to observe such resurfacing events from Earth,” said study co-author Ashley Davies, principal scientist for planetary geosciences at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. declaration. That’s because while infrared images from ground-based telescopes can reveal hot spots indicative of ongoing volcanic eruptions, their resolution is insufficient to identify the exact locations of eruptions and surface changes such as fresh deposits, the researchers say.
“Although this type of resurfacing may be common on Io, few have been detected due to the rarity of spacecraft visits and the previously low spatial resolution available from ground-based telescopes,” Davies and her colleagues wrote in the new paper. studies published Tuesday (June 4) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “SHARK-VIS ushers in a new age in planetary imaging.”
Built by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics at the Astronomical Observatory in Rome, SHARK-VIS achieves its unprecedented sharpness by working in tandem with the LBT Adaptive Optics System, which moves its twin 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 achieved with a ground-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 Astronomy. “It just so happens that when we first observed Io, we found that there really was a big change.”