Volcanic Vanishing Act By the time the Juno spacecraft started swinging around Jupiter in 2016, the belief that Io had a magma ocean was widespread. But Bolton and his colleagues wanted to double ...

They recently applied a similar technique to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, revealing that the fiery moon is unlikely to possess a global magma ocean.

Juno has previously ruled out the existence of a large magma ocean beneath Io's surface that could feed the volcanoes, but these cooling, rising flows could explain how Io's volcanoes erupt.

After years of study, scientists concluded in 2011 that Galileo had detected a global magma ocean just below Io’s crust. Whereas Earth’s mantle is mostly solid and plasticky, Io’s subsurface was ...

Io’s long-debated magma ocean may not exist. Juno spacecraft data reveals that tidal forces deform the moon differently than expected if a magma ocean were present. Instead, Io’s mantle appears mostly ...

Sure enough, the samples appeared to have crystallized from a lunar magma ocean thought to have formed after impact. The samples placed the Moon's age at 4.35 billion years old.

Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System, with roughly 400 active volcanoes regularly ejecting magma into space. This activity arises from Io’s eccentric ...

Discovery of Io’s Magma Chambers Scientists from NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter have discovered that the volcanoes on the planet’s moon Io are likely fueled by individual magma chambers rather than a ...

On the one hand, magnetic induction measurements conducted by the Galileo mission suggested the existence of a magma ocean within Io, approximately 50 km thick and located near the surface. These ...

Nimmo and his colleagues hypothesize that a remelting event driven by the Moon’s orbital evolution could account for the frequent occurrence of approximately 4.35-billion-year-old rocks—such as those ...

The crash would have liquified the Earth and vaporized some of it, along with producing the Moon. Back then, it would have been covered by a magma ocean that had to cool down and solidify into rocks.