Jupiter’s moon Io has possibly been erupting for a very, very, very long time.
Io is the most volcanically active body in our solar system, with some of its volcanoes shooting magma higher than planes on Earth fly (SN: 5/3/22). And while extreme, it seems that this hellish behavior is no short-lived phase. Io may have been volcanically active throughout its entire 4.57-billion-year existence, researchers report April 18 in Science.
“If Io has been volcanic for its entire history, the amount of material that has to have erupted onto its surface is tens to hundreds of times its entire mantle,” says Caltech planetary scientist Katherine de Kleer. That erupted
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