Jupiter's volcanic moon Io may be hundreds of times hotter than scientists thought

Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active world in the solar system. This high-resolution image of Jupiter’s fifth moon was captured by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft and was published on 18, Dec. 1997. .

Using data from NASA's Juno spacecraft, scientists have discovered that the solar system's most volcanic body is even hotter than we thought. In fact, Jupiter's moon Io could be emitting hundreds of times as much heat from its surface as was previously estimated.

The reason for this underestimate wasn't due to a lack of data, but was a result of how Juno's data was interpreted. The results also demonstrate that about half of the heat radiating from Io comes from just 17 of 266 the moon's known volcanic sources. The team behind this research thinks that this clear concentration of heat, rather than a global emission, could suggest that an Io-wide lava lake may not exist beneath the surface of this moon of Jupiter as has previously been theorized.