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NASA's Juno spacecraft recently captured this disturbing sight of Jupiter, which shows a massive black patch over the swirling clouds of the gas giant. It sounds scary, but there is a perfectly reasonable explanation: it is a shadow projected by the extremely volcanic moon of Jupiter, Io.
Juno captured this astonishing series of images on Sept. 12 as he was attending his 22nd edition, or close encounter, with Jupiter. The NASA spacecraft, which arrived at the Jovian system in July 2017, is in an extremely elliptical polar orbit that brings it closer to the gas giant's cloud-top and then back into a deeper space.
Juno was about 8,000 km from the surface when his JunoCam captured these images. The probe is currently following a trajectory that will lead it to more than eight million km from the gas giant before returning for its 23rd journey, according to the same source. Universe today.
It is currently expected that Juno will perform about a dozen more perijoves before the end of the mission in July 2021, but the mission could be extended further in the 2020s – fingers crossed for this because images like this This and others are moving our world.
The total solar eclipse is about as close as we will ever see on Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. To be honest, it is rather an annular eclipse because the shadow of Io is not even about to cover the whole surface of Jupiter.
To be even more accurate, we probably should not be talking about this celestial event as an eclipse, but rather a transit, similar to the way exoplanets traverse host stars, allowing astronomers to detect them from our point of view on Earth. .
However, the shadow is big enough, all things considered; Io is only slightly larger than the Earth's Moon The big black circle is due to an optical effect in which the total size of the shadow of the object, the penumbra, increases with the remoteness of the light source, in the occurrence the Sun.
The same thing happens on Earth during eclipses of the sun – a magnificently captured effect of space in 2016.
The biggest volcano of Molten Moon Io of Jupiter is likely to burst anytime
Observational data collected over the years suggest that Jupiter's largest moon volcano, Io – the most geologically active object in the solar system – will make its appearance in mid-September, which is virtually the case now.
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Io is the fourth largest moon in the solar system and the deepest of Jupiter's four Galilean moons. This volcanic moon is quite close to Jupiter and only takes 42.5 hours to complete a complete orbit.
Indeed, in addition to having about the size of the moon on Earth, Io is at a similar distance to Jupiter – a proximity that contributes to its overactive geology. The tremendous gravitational influence of the gas giant creates a warming effect of the tides on the moon.
Io is then the most volcanic object in the solar system, with hundreds of volcanoes producing plumes up to 500 km above its surface.
Last fun fact, Io's biggest volcano, Loki, should explode at any time. There is therefore potentially more information about this lunar and molten moon that will arrive in the coming days.
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