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  • 5 months ago
How many volcanoes does the surface of Io have?
Transcript
00:00NASA's Juno spacecraft launched way back in 2011, but since 2016 it's been orbiting our solar system's largest planet, Jupiter.
00:12But recently it got up close with the gas giant's third largest moon, Io, and you can literally see volcanoes peppering the landscape of the highly active moon.
00:20The image was actually taken over the summer, but was only recently released by NASA.
00:24Experts at NASA say that over the course of 30 orbits, they've been watching Io's volcanic surface change and evolve.
00:30Io is the most volcanic place in the entire solar system, with more than 400 volcanoes.
00:35But still, planetologists were surprised by not only the amount of obvious lava spewing craters, but also their locations.
00:41They discovered more activity in the polar regions than equatorially, unlike our own planet.
00:46But what's perhaps even more wild is that despite being around 262,000 miles from Jupiter,
00:51Io and its volcanoes play an important role in the large planet's auroras,
00:55which experts say Io is not just interacting with the magnetosphere produced light, but actually instigating them.
01:00However, Jupiter's auroras are the brightest we've seen.
01:03No surprise considering its magnetosphere is 20,000 times more powerful than Earth's.
01:08eagle meters above gelmiĹźs.
01:09Speaker 2
01:12genteel
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