New research suggests that the moon's orbit could have turned it into a molten monster for a few tens of millions of years. The result may have been comparable to Jupiter's moon Io, the most ...

Jupiter's volcanic moon Io doesn't appear to have a subsurface ocean of magma, resolving some issues about how Io's volcanoes erupt and raising broader questions about similar magma oceans within ...

"We think that the Moon went through a period when it looked like Io, and for the same reason," says Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist with the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"Detecting an exomoon would be quite extraordinary, and because of Io, we know that a volcanic exomoon is possible." Their findings were published Sept. 30 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Jupiter and Earth were near their closest all year, but it still took over half an hour for a signal to go from Earth to the probe or vice-versa.

Jupiter’s moon Io has been continuously shaped by volcanic activity for billions of years — possibly even for the Solar System’s entire 4.57-billion-year history, a study suggests.

As NASA explains, the source of Io's "torment" is thanks to being "extremely close to the mammoth gas giant, and its elliptical orbit whips it around Jupiter once every 42.5 hours.

The closest planet to our sun is Mercury, which has an elliptical, or non-circular, orbit that ranges between 46 million and 69.82 million kilometers (28.5 million to 43.3 million miles) from the sun.

When Juno’s orbit swooped past Io last December, its cameras captured a mirrorlike reflection from a small patch of the moon’s surface.