With that in mind, you can maybe imagine the sheer fury of so many of them exploding constantly all over the whole planet’s surface. The volcanoes on Io’s surface aren’t small either some of them reach heights greater than that of Mount Everest on Earth. It’s caused by immense gravitational forces between Jupiter and its larger neighboring moons creating tidal heating and friction beneath Io’s crust. This extreme volcanism makes Io the most tectonically active object in the whole solar system. Unlike our moon, however, Io is covered in extremely active, constantly exploding volcanos that endlessly jet out sprays of lava, sulfur, and toxic clouds of sulfur dioxide up to 500km (300 miles) into the sky above this hellish world. This makes it just slightly larger than our own moon. This particular moon orbits the solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter, and is its third-largest satellite. Well for NASA’s latest photo of Io, all the opposite is finally made real in one image.
The same goes for many other worlds, which either look too abstractly beautiful to give a real impression of their awful surface conditions or are just barren in a way that doesn’t communicate much emotionally. Images of places on Mars, especially those taken on a sunny day by one of our surface rovers on the planet, almost look like something captured in a desert corner of Earth itself. Images of worlds like Neptune or Uranus can even do the opposite by creating a notion of balmy blue seas and skies. While we all know that no other planet or moon in the solar system can even remotely be called friendly to life, photos of the other planets don’t always easily convey the sheer hostility of their landscapes. NASA has been on a roll of superb space photos recently and its latest shots of the Jovian moon Io are a truly terrifying example of our hostile solar system.
0 kommentar(er)
