The biggest volcano of Molten Moon Io of Jupiter is likely to burst anytime

Observational data collected over the years suggest that the largest volcano on the moon of Jupiter, the most geologically active object in the solar system, will erupt in mid-September.

In terms of eruptions, volcanoes tend to operate according to their own unpredictable schedules. This is not the case for Loki, however, the biggest volcano on Io. When this happens, which it tends to do regularly, it represents 15% of the total thermal expenditure of the Moon. This 200-kilometer-wide volcano is so powerful that astronomers can observe its attacks with ground-based telescopes, making it the best studied volcano on Earth.

Astronomer Julie Rathbun of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona has been observing for 20 years with astonishment the fact that this volcano erupts with worrying regularity. According to her latest calculations, Loki is expected to burst in mid-September, as she announced today at the joint EPSC-DPS 2019 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, according to a press release issued by the Europlanet company. Before that, Rathbun had correctly predicted that Loki would erupt in May 2018.

Indeed, Rathbun knows quite well this volcano. In 2002, she identified Loki as a periodic volcano. Analyzing the data collected from 1988 to 2000, she found that the horseshoe-shaped giant burst about 540 days later. But then, the moon, faithful to the trick god who gave it its name, died out in the 2000s, hatching less often and without perceptible reason. This changed from 2013, when Rathbun set a new schedule in which Loki appeared every 475 days, with eruptions lasting about 160 days.

Loki, whom Rathbun suspects is a big lake of spilled lava (and unfortunately not a stunning lava cake), is predictable because of its incredible girth.

"Because of its size, the basic physics will probably be dominant when it breaks out, so the small complications that affect smaller volcanoes probably will not affect Loki as much," Rathbun said in a Europlanet publication. .

In a short document prepared for the EPSC-DPS meeting, Rathbun stated that Loki "is a lava lake with a crust that solidifies on cooling," and that "the time that elapses between eruptions is the the time it takes for the crust to become gravitationally unstable and therefore related to the porosity of the lava. "

But since Loki had already changed his schedule, Rathbun warned that his latest prediction was not flawless.

"Volcanoes are so difficult to predict because they are so complicated," she said. "There are many factors that influence volcanic eruptions, including magma supply, magma composition – especially the presence of bubbles in the magma, the type of rock the volcano is in, its fracture state. and many other problems. "

So, a super neat prediction for a super cool moon. Hope we will have something to report in the next few days.