February 14, 2026 • 49 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe return once more to the Jovian moon of Io, to discuss more recent findings about its volcanism and geology, as well as a look at the mythology behind its name. (part 3 of 3) (originally published 2/13/2025)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Today is Saturday,
Valentine's Day apparently, and we have a vault episode for you.
This is going to be The Burning Mountains of Io,
Part three. It originally published two thirteen, twenty twenty five.
It is part three of three. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with the
third and final part in our series on Jupiter's moon Io,
the innermost and third largest of Jupiter's four Galilean moons
and the most volcanic body in our solar system. Years ago,
we did a multi part series on the moons of
Jupiter at large, but this time we wanted to come
(01:03):
back and do a deeper focus on Io, in particular
to explore its own peculiar Hadean prodigies, because it really is,
as I've said in the previous two parts, I think
probably one of the most dramatic places in our Solar system,
certainly beyond Earth. Now, if you haven't heard the previous
two parts yet, I would recommend you go back and listen.
(01:25):
Listen to those in order, but to briefly recap, we
started off by talking in detail about some really eerie
and thrilling images of the surface of Io, mostly based
on data collected in twenty twenty three and twenty twenty
four by NASA's Juno mission. These images highlighted a lot
of the really enigmatic features of the Moon's topography, including
(01:47):
these gargantuan thorn like mountains and volcanic highlands, huge fields
blanketed and yellow sulfurous frost, Vast lakes of molten lava
constantly overturning with ways waves, giant lava flows spreading in
some cases hundreds of kilometers, forever resurfacing the Moon and
erasing all the scars of its history. We also talked
(02:10):
about the physical ironies of the conditions on Io, including
the fact that it is at once deep cold due
to its extremely thin sulfur dioxide atmospheres inability to trap heat.
Doesn't really have much of an atmosphere, can't trap heat there,
but of course in places it is unimaginably hot due
of course, two volcanic eruptions. According to a volcanologist we
(02:33):
discussed in Part one a single one of the Moon's volcanoes,
the lava lake known as Loki Petera, which we did
do a little focus on, that was the one that
has has a big island in the middle of it
actually has a number of islands, but one big old
island in the middle, which which shall not be named.
That one volcano emits more heat than all of Earth's
(02:55):
volcanoes combined, which is a pretty startling fact. We also
talked in previous parts a bit very briefly about the
historical exploration of Io, including Carl Sagan's account of the
discoveries made by the voyager one Probe in nineteen seventy nine.
We talked about the character from Greek myth that provides
Io its name, about how the story of Io was
(03:18):
told by Avid and other ancient authors, and how in
ancient times the character of Io was said to overlap
or interact with other religious figures, such as the Egyptian
goddess Isis. In Part two, we discussed when and how
Io tends to pop up in science fiction storytelling. There's
sometimes what at least feels like a dearth of Io stories,
(03:41):
and then we talked about a mystery regarding images of
so called ridges on the Moon's surface, which paradoxically look
extremely similar to wind driven sand dunes on Earth and Mars.
This is paradoxical because of the tenuous, barely their atmosphere
of Io, which wouldn't see to be thick enough to
support the winds needed to make dunes. And then we
(04:04):
got into a paper that offered a likely solution to
this mystery. Finally, in the last episode, we talked about
the possibility of life on Io Io being a blasted, cursed, irradiated, waterless, sulfurous,
freezing cold, searing hot kind of nightmare ball, a place
from the video game Doom I would not seem to
be a good place to look for signs of extraterrestrial life,
(04:27):
but if it were to exist there, we talked about
some astrobiology speculation on where and how that life might persist.
And now we are back today to round out the discussion,
talk about a few more things that's right, all new
things quite true in fact. To kick things off today,
I want to talk about a pretty new research paper.
I think it was just published a couple of months
(04:48):
ago in the journal Nature, I believe in December twenty
twenty four. Which addresses a longstanding mystery about the interior
of Io. We've talked about the mysteries of its surface,
but now we're going to talk about mysteries of what
lies inside. So this paper was by park at All
and it's called Io's Tidle Response Precludes a shallow magma Ocean,
(05:11):
again published in Nature twenty twenty four, So a bit
of context about this. For the past four decades or so,
there has been a question about what powered the volcanic
eruptions on Io, and it was long suspected for a
number of reasons, but not confirmed, that underneath the surface
(05:34):
of the Moon there lay a vast planetary magma ocean,
sometimes thought to be maybe roughly fifty kilometers deep below
the surface, a vast ocean of liquid magma stretching around
the planet, which found release points at each of Io's
roughly four hundred active volcanoes. So this was long suspected
(05:56):
by some researchers to be the case. But this new paper,
published in Nature in twenty twenty four has a group
of researchers who took information gathered by the NASA Juno
mission and used it to argue that the magma ocean
hypothesis cannot be correct, and instead each volcano is probably
(06:17):
powered by its own distinct magma chamber, and I'm going
to try to explain how we get there. So a reminder,
going back to part one of this series, volcanic activity
on Io was not directly detected until the discovery of
a volcanic plume by NASA JPL scientist Linda Morabito in
nineteen seventy nine. The image was found in actually navigational
(06:42):
images created by the Voyager one spacecraft. Volcanism had been
hypothesized by the astrophysicist Stanton Peel beforehand, but this was
the first time direct evidence was identified. But ever since
the erupting volcanoes were first discovered, there has been this
mystery about like what's inside the moon to feed the eruptions?
(07:04):
And I wanted to read a quote here by JUNO
principal investigator Scott Bolton, who is quoted in a NASA
press release about this new paper. Bolton summarizes it saying, quote,
since Mora Beido's discovery, planetary scientists have wondered how the
volcanoes were fed from the lava underneath the surface. Was
there a shallow ocean of white hot magma fueling the volcanoes,
(07:28):
or was their source more localized. We knew data from
Juno's two very close flybys could give us some insights
on how this tortured moon actually worked. So how did
they investigate this? Well? I thought this was pretty cool.
So the Juno spacecraft did flybys of Io in December
twenty twenty three and February twenty twenty four, and during
(07:50):
those close passes, Juno interfaced with an Earth based tool
called NASA's Deep Space Network, which is a network of
three equidistant ground based radio antennas on Earth. There's one
in California, there's one in Australia, and one in Spain.
And the ideas with this equidistant spacing of these antennas,
(08:12):
they always at least one of them can maintain contact
with something in space. You never have it going dark. Together,
these instruments were able to acquire high precision Doppler readings
to detect minute changes in Juno's acceleration, which was in
turn able to tell us things about the gravity of Io,
(08:33):
but the gravitational influence of Io, because it was primarily
Io's gravity that would have been affecting Juno's acceleration at
these moments. So essentially researchers were looking for how the
gravitational field of IO changes during its tidal stretching cycle.
More on that than just a minute, because that would
help us know how rigid the Moon is. A more
(08:56):
rigid IO would be consistent with a more solid interior,
but a more flexible IO would indicate a liquid magma
ocean underneath. Now on that sort of flexing and stretching cycle,
IO is in a very close orbit around Jupiter. The
average distance between the planet and the Moon is four
(09:17):
hundred and twenty two thousand kilometers over the course of
its roughly forty two point five hour orbits. Now, that
is not much further than the distance between the Earth
and the Moon, which is about three hundred and eighty
four thousand kilometers, except think of how big Jupiter is.
In the words of Scott Bolton, the junoprincipal investigator IO
(09:40):
is orbiting a monster and this has many different effects.
We've talked about some of them already, but a big
one is a gravitational effect. Gravity follows the inverse square law,
meaning that the attractive force between two objects in space
is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them,
(10:02):
and another way of thinking about that is, as you
get closer to a planet, the force of gravity asserted
on you rapidly becomes greater. So get a little bit
closer to Jupiter and you get pulled harder toward it.
A strange thing about Io is that, in addition to
being very close in orbit around a very massive planet,
(10:22):
the orbit of this moon is also not circular. It
is slightly elliptical, meaning that if you look down from
above the orbital plane, you're going to see the orbit
being slightly longer in one direction than another. It's a
little bit more oval shaped than a circle. This elliptical
orbit is actually because of regular gravitational influence by two
(10:46):
more of the Galilean moons, Europa and Ganymede. These moons
are in what's called an orbital resonance with Io, which
means that their orbits are sort of like small integer
multiples of the orbits of iOS. They frequently line up
in the same place as Io as they're going around
the planet, and the fact that they continually line up
(11:08):
in the same direction over and over means that they
sort of stretch Io's orbit in that one direction. So
the elliptical orbit of Io means that the distance between
Io and Jupiter keeps changing, And so as the distance
keeps changing, the strength of Jupiter's gravitational pull on Io
(11:28):
keeps changing.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Two.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
And this really affects the Moon because it's always the
case that the side of the Moon facing Jupiter experiences
a stronger pull than the side that's farther away. The
nearer side is pulled harder than the far side. But
because of the constantly changing distance between Io and Jupiter,
the difference between the pull on the far side and
(11:52):
the near side of the planet keeps changing too. And
this manifests as what planetary geologists might call tidal flexing.
It's a squeezing, stretching of the solid material that the
Moon is made of in the fluctuating gravitational field. You
can kind of just imagine this by by like holding
a rubber ball in your hand and just like squeezing
(12:14):
it over and over again. It's a it's a flexing
of the material that the moon is made of. Now, Rob,
did you ever do the thing in like the school
cafeteria when you were younger where you get one of those,
you know, cheap metal forks, cafeteria forks, and you bend
it back and forth a bunch of times, real fast,
until it gets hot.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
No, I never did this. I didn't even know this
was a thing. I mean, I mean, physically, I understand
why it's possible, but I didn't know it was a
thing that kids do.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
I guess it was the thing I did. I don't
know sure, is that are most forks supposed to bend
like that?
Speaker 1 (12:50):
You're using your hands right, not your mind?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
Yes, just hands, just hands. This this has got to
be possible only with like real bottom shelf cutlery. But yeah,
so you know, you flex a piece of metal back
and forth a bunch of times. Usually what you will
find is that the metal heats up. The flexing causes
a frictional force within the material that excites the atoms,
(13:13):
and it makes the metal hot or at least warm.
Similar principle here. The flexing of the Moon by the
changing gravitational field as it gets closer and farther away
from Jupiter causes frictional heating of the inside of the Moon,
and that heat is immense. It is so immense that
it melts parts of the Moon's interior, and this massive
(13:35):
build up of internal heat energy is released to the
surface through volcanic eruptions. But this brings us back to
the question we started with, what is the nature of
the subsurface magma source? To read from the paper in
Nature quote for decades, it has been speculated that this
extreme tidal heating may be sufficient to melt a substantial
(13:58):
fraction of Io's interior, plausibly forming a global subsurface magma ocean.
Many worlds are believed to have had magma oceans early
in their evolution, notably the early Moon referring to Earth's
moon there, notably the early Moon which is thought to
have had a shallow magma ocean in the first one
(14:19):
hundred million years, caused by the giant impact that birthed
the body, which that is not new information in this paper,
but that on its own is just a fascinating fact
to consider it, you know. So there is the main
theory of the origin of the current Earth and Moon
is the giant impact hypothesis. So the idea is that
(14:39):
roughly four and a half billion years ago, during the
formation of the Solar System, when the you know, the
planets were just accreting. There was a collision between the
early proto Earth and some kind of roughly Mars sized object,
and this collision caused a fracturing that eventually ended up
causing the the separation of the material that became the
(15:02):
Earth and became the Moon. So that's the common origin
of the Earth we have now and where the Moon
came from. And so the idea here is that for
the first one hundred million years or so after that,
the Moon probably had a global shallow magma ocean surrounded
by liquid by molten rockow would have been cool to see,
(15:25):
perhaps not physically cool, but anyway. So the authors cite
that as an example of a global shallow magma ocean
surrounding a planetary body or a moon, and then the
quote goes on to say Io's extreme volcanism strongly suggests
the existence of at least a partially molten interior. Whether
(15:46):
the interior contains a shallow global magma ocean has been
an outstanding question since the discovery of Io's volcanism. Now,
beyond these theoretical models, were there any recent experiments that
would have provided support for the idea of a global
magma ocean. I was looking into this, and it appears, yes,
(16:07):
there were some good reasons, some findings that pointed in
this direction. Apparently, the Galileo mission took some magnetic measurements
that were thought to be consistent with a shallow, shallow
reserve of global magma. And I also wanted to flag
another argument for the magma ocean. I came across in
a space dot com article by Keith Cooper, which pointed
(16:31):
out that previous data collected by the junomission had actually
enabled researchers to create the first global map of Io's
volcanic activity. Rob actually pasted a picture of this global
map in the outline for you to look at here.
And so it's got little color coded polka dots of
different energy levels of volcanic eruptions all over Io's surface.
(16:54):
The authors here assembled this map based on near infrared
signatures of Io's poll polar regions. In particular, data collected
by previous missions had already done some of this mapping,
I think, but had left us with an incomplete picture
of volcanic activity near the poles. And I was reading
a space dot Com article that quoted study author Ashley Davies,
(17:17):
a volcanologist, at NASA, JPL and Caltech Pasadena, and Davies
explained their findings by saying, quote, before this analysis, it
was thought that Io's polar volcanoes were fewer and more
powerful than at lower latitudes. We showed that polar volcanoes
are about as prevalent as at lower latitudes, and actually
(17:38):
with lower emitted power, suggesting smaller eruptions. And another thing
the researchers found is that these findings were interpreted by
computer modeling to lend support to the hypothesis of a
global subsurface magma ocean. So it seemed like this looked
good for the magma ocean.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Did they consider connecting these dots and seeing if it
made a pentagram or not, because that's generally what you
do in detective movies.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
It really does look like people should be putting tax
in and putting string between them, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Yeah? Yeah, say it all lines up with that unnamed island.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Yeah, well, that unnamed island is I'm sure going to
be right around one of the yellow dots here. In fact,
I think I see where Loki Ptera is, and yes
it is. In fact one of it is one of
the hottest types of dots, any pentangles, I'm not really
seeing it.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
If you want them bad enough, they will manifest.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
But anyway, coming back to the new Jono experiment, park
it all from twenty twenty four, So the author is
use the Doppler data from the JUNO flybys and the
Deep Space Network radio telescopes, as well as data previously
collected by the Galileo mission to try to look at
the tidal deformation of Io. And again remember they're looking
(18:51):
for if it's more, if it's stretching more, if it
seems more easily deformed, that probably means liquid magma ocean underneath.
And if it's more rigid, that probably means that it
is more solid underneath. And they concluded based on their
findings that Io could not have a global magma ocean
underneath its surface. Instead, the Moon must be mostly solid
(19:12):
with individual magma chambers driving the hundreds of volcanoes. The
authors of the Paperwright quote, our results indicate that tidal
forces do not universally create global magma oceans, which may
be prevented from forming owing to rapid melt ascent, intrusion
and eruption. So even strong tidal heating such as that
(19:34):
expected on several known exoplanets and super earths may not
guarantee the formation of magma oceans on moons or planetary bodies,
and rob I've got a little artist's rendition for you
to look at here. This is an artist's impression of
the interior of Io informed by these new findings. Does
not show a global magma ocean. Instead shows these the pockets,
(19:57):
these magma chambers that are leading up to the volcanoes
on the surface, some of these volcanoes being connected to
plumes that we see erupting far over the surface of
the planet. This has more the look of you know,
it's like when you see superheroes and movies that like
have the fire inside and you see their skin kind
of cracking and then the fire is ready to come out.
(20:19):
It looks like it's about to go supermode exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Yeah. Yeah, these kind of yeah, these deep I want
to describe them as veins because they don't really have
that kind of rooting pattern. But deep fissures, I guess
would be more glowing fissures would be the way to
describe them.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
And so perhaps one reason Io doesn't have a magma
ocean would be all of its volcanoes, they may in
fact be dissipating the heat that would otherwise melt the mantle.
The author's right in their conclusion quote. On Earth, deep
melts can be denser than the surrounding mantle and thus
remain sequestered. In a basal magma ocean. On io, pressures
(21:00):
are much lower, so mantle melts are expected to be
always less dense than the surrounding solid mantle. The melts
will tend to ascend, making maintenance of a deep magma
ocean dynamically problematic. Conversely, if the melts are dense, for example,
if sufficiently iron rich, although a deep magma ocean could
then form, it would be hard to explain how any
(21:23):
such melt would ascend and erupt. Thus, we conclude that
the volcanism seen on iosurface is not sourced from a
global magma ocean. So it seems like that interesting idea
is likely put to rest unless something causes us to
really reinterpret these results. But despite the magma reserves not
being part of a sort of global shared ocean in nature,
(21:46):
I still think that leaves the volcanoes and the plumes,
and the eruptions and the lava lakes no less fascinating
and charismatic.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Yeah. Yeah. Plus, you know, if you miss that, if
you miss that vision of what IO is, it's probably
out there somewhere else in the universe. So you can
just imagine that it's out there somewhere waiting.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
For you used to be present on our moon.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yeah yeah, it's somewhere else in time and space and
in time, maybe a lot closer than you thought. Now.
One of the features of the illustration that you showed me,
(22:31):
and certainly listeners can find various images that either depict
this or are actual captures of this. One of the
distinguishing features that you often see with IO is that
of these plumes coming up from its surface, a volcanic
eruption that is ejecting material into space. And it is
(22:52):
always kind of weird to look at because it feels
completely out of scale, like we're not used to seeing,
you know, we we've all seen images of volcanic eruptions,
and yes they can actually they can look quite alarming
from orbit, but this just looks These just look amazing
because the moon in profile has this plume coming off
(23:13):
of it, just this ridiculously far reaching plume of volcanic eruption,
and so that's what I want to explore here in
this next section, getting into like what exactly this is,
what does it mean for not only Io but for
the the basically the entire orbital realm of Jupiter itself.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
I totally agree with what you say about looking at
these plumes, that the plumes, even in real direct images
taken from reality, look fake. They look like they look
like art. The word photo can be misleading because the
instruments used to capture these images can be different. In nature,
it's not always just visual light. But but yeah, like
direct images of reality that we're looking at, but they're
(23:58):
that they look like a yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Yeah, like this is grotesque and ridiculous. But I'm reminded
of pimples. You know, usually in profile, you are not
going to notice a pimple, And if a pimple were
to burst on a person, you wouldn't see that in profile.
You wouldn't see like the silhouette of the eruption. And
if you were to see that, well, you would be
(24:21):
watching like an itchy and scratchy cartoon or a SpongeBob
cartoon or something. It would be a cartoon exaggeration of
reality and that's what the scale of these things really
looks like.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Yeah, that's right. We see plumes on Io that are
like somebody with a three inch high pimple that when
you pop it, it squirts like six feet off their body.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Yes, So what's going on here? Well, you know, here
on Earth we certainly have powerful volcanic eruptions as well,
we have in the past, and they occur periodically and
they will continue to occur. But we also have some
other things going for us that you don't find on
Io and you don't find everywhere else. In our Solar system.
(25:02):
We have a robust atmosphere, We have resulting wind resistance
and sufficient gravity to place the necessary escape velocity beyond
what even a very powerful terrestrial eruption is capable of reaching.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Right, So that escape velocity number is going to mean
that our volcanoes, they might erupt quite powerfully, but they're
not blasting stuff out into space so that it never
comes back, or not much stuff certainly.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Yeah, I've read that while terrestrial volcanoes can't really blast
things into orbit, they can reach really high into the atmosphere,
in arguably touching space. For instance, the twenty twenty two
Hanga Tonga volcanic eruption supposedly shot water vapor up that
high to where it was essentially touching space. But it's
(25:50):
not quite what we're seeing with Io at all.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Right, And even if it were to go into space
and go into orbit, that still wouldn't be a scape velocity.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Right right. Yeah, you've got to get all the way
out of there, you got to. It's got to be
a complete breakup with the planet, not one of these things.
We'll continue to see each other socially. No, no, no,
you've got to be out of there.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Volcanoes are not doing that.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
So this thinking about this led me to, you know,
get into escape velocity uh here on Earth and elsewhere,
and ways to escape it. You know. The most obvious
way to do it is, of course, in a rocket.
That's what we're used to seeing with our Earth space technology.
The escape velocity on Earth is eleven point one eighty
(26:35):
six kilometers per second. That is, that's that's going to
be a higher velocity than is necessary for any of
the other inner planets. On Earth's own moon it's two
point thirty eight kilometers per second, and on Io the
number I've seen is two point five five eight so
(26:55):
just to give you a little frame of reference for
what we're talking about here again coming back to what
does Earth have that a lot of these other suspects
don't you know? It has the gravity, it has the
robust atmosphere, and so forth. So this all adds up
to a greater necessary escape velocity for anything that is
leaving the surface of the planet or any point within
(27:17):
the atmosphere of the planet and hoping to free itself
of our orbital dominion. Now, one thing, I want to
go ahead and get out of the way at the
top here there, I think a lot of people have
probably heard the legendary manhole shot into space story via
operation plumb Bob. These were atomic tests in nineteen fifty seven.
(27:40):
The idea here was that you had these test wells
for atomic detonations with a metal cap on the top,
essentially a manhole cover, and at least one of these
blasted the cap off, and it was said that it
achieved such velocity. In fact, I think the number that
(28:00):
is often cited is six times the necessary escape velocity,
and therefore flew off into space and is potentially still
out there well. According to a twenty twenty two snop's
article by Bethania Palma. There's nothing actually out there to
back this up. This all seems to stem from a
comment by Robert Brownly, who worked on the project, who
(28:25):
remarked that the manhole cover in question would have been
blasted off at six times the necessary escape velocity. It
apparently went flying, but that's all that's really known. We
don't know if it was launched into space, and if
it was, we have no records or recording of it.
I think it's also been mentioned that it's possible that
it would have burnt up on the way up as well,
(28:48):
So you know, we have to consider all these options.
But there's no clear evidence that this thing actually made
it into orbit or beyond orbit and so forth.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Yeah, all we actually know is that this was a piece,
a solid piece of metal that was hit from below
with tremendous energy. But we don't know exactly what happened
to that matter and energy afterwards. What its journey was
question mark right now. Of course, we already mentioned rockets.
Rockets are you know, we can compare rockets to volcanoes
(29:19):
in that you know, the rocket is taking advantage of
a very explosive chemical reaction in order to propel this,
you know, tower of steel and so forth upwards through
the atmosphere, and you know it's and rocket science has
come a long way. It's ultimately a lot more dependable
than trying to blast into space on a volcano, which
(29:41):
again probably wouldn't give you the exactly the push you needed. Anyway,
I wonder if it's been tried.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
It you'd have to be you'd have to be so patient.
I don't think. I don't think it's just maybe there's
some sort of sci fi scenario, or it would make
sense if you know of a science fiction tale which
someone uses a volcano to escape a planet's orbit, do
write in and tell us about it. Now, in terms
of just using explosions, though, and explosive events to potentially
(30:14):
transfer into orbit or beyond orbit, we do have to
mention Project Ryan here. This has come up on the
show in the past because it is an early concept
of how we might achieve interplanetary travel. It was a
nuclear pulse spaceship concept from the nineteen fifties and sixties.
(30:38):
I think a lot of you may be familiar with
this essentially built around the idea was built around the
concept you could propel a craft through space via a
series of nuclear detonations behind the craft. Not to be
confused with nuclear thermal rockets such as the Nerva project,
(30:58):
in that you'd have a nuclear reaction that was heating
fuel rather than depending on a chemical reaction to do so.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
So the nerve rocket would still be a reaction drive,
but it would just be that the heating is from
nuclear sources.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Correct. Yeah, And that one was never tested in space,
nor was Orion. But the Orion program is like, let's
keep throwing atomic bombs behind the ship, allowing them to explode,
thus propelling our ship onward and onward through space with
each blast like pushing up against a blast plate on
the rear of the vessel. An idea that I've just
(31:36):
always found. I mean, it's it's it's preposterous and yet reasonable,
amazing in its own right, and you know, in in
Yourself to the Stars, Yeah, yeah, and yeah, it's it's
it's one that I've come back to a few different times.
But it's one of Sagan wrote about as well. Actually
(32:00):
up an old like press briefing where someone asked Sagan
about it, and you know, he pointed out he'd written
about it in Cosmos or I don't remember if you'd
written about it in Cosmos or you just discussed it
on the television series. But he pointed out like, Okay, well,
this is actually not a bad way to go ahead
and get rid of some of our atomic weapons. Let's
use them to propel a spaceship. But of course there
(32:22):
are all these various hazards to such a technique as well.
Some of these we'll get into here in the discussion.
So I was, you know, I was mostly familiar with
the concepts involved here, the potential benefits and the downsides.
But one thing that I didn't quite realize is that
early models of the project oriyon nuclear pulse spaceship during
(32:46):
the fifties and sixties actually considered it not only for
propelling a vehicle through space, but for using it in
liftoff in order to achieve escape velocity from Earth.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
WHOA, I don't think I'd ever thought of it that way.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeah. I was reading about this in a couple of sources.
One was in a Nuclear Pulse Propulsion Orion and Beyond
by Schmidt at All for NASA, and they pointed out
that early drafts of the proposal called for a bullet
light capsule to be launched from the ground from the
ground via an atomic detonation, likely from a Nevada nuclear
(33:21):
test site. The mass of the vehicle on takeoff would
have been on the order of ten thousand tons, most
of which would have gone into orbit. At takeoff, the
zero point one kiloton yield pulse units would be ejected
at a frequency of one per second. As the vehicle accelerated,
the rate would slow down and the yield would increase
(33:42):
until twenty kiloton pulses would have been detonated every ten seconds.
The vehicle would fly straight up until it cleared the
atmosphere so as to minimize radioactive contamination. This is one
of the big hazards and downsides to this whole concept
is that you would it would entail detonating multiple, multiple
(34:02):
atomic weapons in this model within the atmosphere. But even
if you weren't using that within its atmosphere to achieve
lift off, if you were going to the program where okay,
you know, once you get your spaceship away from Earth,
then you can start dropping bombs in order to accelerate.
Even then you're still causing all of these detonations, and
(34:24):
then what happens when you reach your destination. There are
some models that were outlined that would call for detonating
bombs as you landed, thus like you know, nuking the
landing site ahead of your arrival, and if there are
people on board, whether they're gonna have to deal with
with the literal fallout of all of that. The original
(34:44):
concept was created by Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson, and
Freeman Dyson's son, George Dyson, claimed historian of science, wrote
about all this in the book Project Orion, The True
Story of the Atomic Spaceship, and he points out quote
these early four thousand ton ground launch versions of Orion
(35:06):
specified the ejection of about eight hundred bombs raging and
yield from zero point fifteen kilotons at sea level to
five kilotons in space to reach a three hundred mile
orbit around Earth. Points out that each bomb would have
weighed around half a ton. Less yield would be necessary
at lower altitudes, since the thicker air itself would absorb
(35:28):
energy and add to the kick against that plate. But
then you would need more yield. You'd have to steadily
increase the yield of the detonations as the vessel is
propelled upwards, and this would have all required like tight
precision and exactly how you're detonating these bombs, and even
how you're getting them back there underneath the ship, like
(35:49):
is it a trapdoor or is there some sort of
a you know, some sort of a targeted rocket system
that launches them alongside the vessel and then back underneath it.
You know, you would have to work out all of
those problems. So that's about eight hundred bombs. The original
design called for about two thousand bombs or two thousand
pulse units, far more than needed to reach orbit according
(36:11):
to their calculations, but that was because they'd set their
sites pretty high. Their slogan was Mars by nineteen sixty five,
Saturn by nineteen seventy, and they were talking about like
crews of one hundred and fifty people. So this was
a really ambitious concept. Obviously, this is not the way
it all worked out.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
I mean I said this in a totally different context earlier.
But there's a cartoonishness to this. It kind of reads
like a joke.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah, it does, and I think that's one of the
reasons it resonates so well. It's like this interesting perversion
of the accumulation of atomic weapons, though not necessarily a
negative pervert, like the accumulation of atomic weapons is already
a perversion in many respects. But the idea of then
taking them all and using them to propel a spaceship
(36:59):
to another planet, you know, with such ambition, it you know,
it's ultimately more attractive. Like Sagan said, it's like, well,
that's one way to get rid of the weapons, or
at least that's the way he put it at one point.
(37:24):
Now the concept here continued to evolve again, they ended
up moving away from the idea of it potentially blasting
off of the surface of the Earth like this via
atomic weapon detonations. It had many powerful supporters, but it
never came to fruition for a variety of reasons, including cost,
including risk, and of course including international treaties about nuclear testing.
(37:47):
George Dyson points out that, yeah, you had these had
various drawbacks to such a program, including the idea that
if you were going to use detonations while potentially a
landing a ship in another world, again, you would be
pre contaminating the landing site. So even if you even
if that wasn't going to make it too you know,
radioactive for then humans to venture out on the surface
(38:09):
of this destination world. You're still messing with what you
were going to explore to begin with. You know, uh
so so many different reasons to not go in this direction.
Now you might be wondering, was there another way to
get something into orbit from Earth's surface without some sort
of an explosion. Well, there has been research into the
use of centrifugial force, and such research actually continues at
(38:33):
least as as a rocket aid to decrease the dependence
on traditional rockets. You know, you can think essentially like
slingshots in terms of like the basic fundamentals here. This
is the sort of thing we could potentially come back
and do a more dedicated episode on this idea, because
again they're there. There as at least one company out
(38:54):
there that continues doing a lot of well funded work
in this area. Now elsewhere in speculation and in science fiction,
there are some ideas related to directed panspermia to consider,
so directed PAMs spermias, of course, they this would entail
the intentional seeding of other worlds with life, and in
(39:15):
some creative takes on what this might look like, it
might entail some manner of biological propulsion, maybe some sort
of biocannon that enables a seed of some sort to
escape from one world's gravity, drift through space and find
another world. And we actually saw a vision of what
this might look like in a recent film that we
discussed on Weird House Cinema, Beyond the Mind's Eye.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Oh, that's right, with the yon Hammer soundtrack, It's like
the second or third track on there is the one
that the seeds blasting into space and then we see
them form. And what was the deal with that? Like?
Why do I associate that with a cover of Black
Sabbath's Planet Caravan.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Because it was used as a music video for that
cover the Planet Caravan. Yeah, which kind of shakes out,
kind of makes sense. Now is this at all feasible?
I don't know. Again, I think it comes down to
what sort of world are you attempting to escape with
this seed? You know, what's the gravity like, what's the
atmosphere like and so forth. Now I haven't seen this
(40:22):
movie in ages, but I believe the bugs in the
nineteen ninety seven Starship Troopers movie also have something like this.
I think they're called plasma bugs in that and some
sort of organic cannon system.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
Right, biological artillery. Yeah, there's some big bugs that kind
of bend over and they like eject something out of
their backside that goes up into orbit and it takes
out the capital ships.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
All right, So some maybe some sort of weaponized version
of something that might otherwise be used for pan spermic.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
Purposes possibly, who knows.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Now, there's another major player in the world of science
fiction biothreats, and that's the Tyrannids and the Warhammer forty
thousand universe. These are if you're not familiar with these,
they're kind of there's a little bit of zenomorph to them,
except they are a spacefaring species. They have big, big
leviathan bioships and they arrive on worlds and they invade
them and eventually like turn all the bio they convert
(41:21):
all the biomass on the planet. But then they have
to get it off the planet. And interestingly enough, unless
I'm mistaken, they don't have any kind of way of
like launching it directly back up with their you know,
entirely biological civilization. Instead, they depend on something called capillary towers,
(41:41):
which are like organic space elevators. So they just have
the big ships in orbit suck it all up back
off the surface of the planet, which I guess is
one way to potentially do this.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
Sounds kind of necromonger style.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a certain necromongernous to them, or
there's a certain tyrannid nature. Did the neckromongers one way
or the other? Including an image an illustration here of
what this might look like, you know, the big coiling
ambilical cord going from the planet's surface up to some
sort of you know, horrifying living alien vessel.
Speaker 3 (42:18):
Yikes, give me out.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
But anyway, back to the real world, back to volcanoes. Yeah, so,
while Earth volcanoes can't blast things into orbit space, volcanoes,
including ice volcanoes, which I think we've talked about on
the show before, absolutely can and the volcanoes of Io,
dealing with much less gravity and atmosphere, can easily jet
their contents into orbit, and not only into their orbit,
(42:42):
but into the orbit of Jupiter. Ah.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
Well, this actually brings us back to the one of
the first things we talked about in the series, when
we were discussing Carl Sagan's comments about what scientists knew
as the voyager probe was approaching Jupiter before they actually
had to direct evidence of the volcanoes. One of the
indications that there might be something strange going on with
(43:05):
Io was he said that they had already detected a
huge doughnut shaped tube of atoms in orbit around Jupiter,
basically within the sort of the same position as the
orbit of the Moon. Io made up of just like
just isolated atoms of things like sulfur and potassium and sodium.
And for some reason that's just going around the planet.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
Why that's right. Yeah, These eruptions create a toroidal or
doughnut shaped cloud of charged particles that follow Io's orbit
and wraps part of the way around Jupiter. It's also
referred to as a plasma taurus, and it produces ultra
violet light, intense radiation, and as Io orbits Jupiter, it
(43:49):
travels through the torrent, generating an enormous electrical current, thus
amplifying Jupiter's magnetosphere. So the ioplasma Taurus play a major
role in strengthening the most powerful magnetosphere in the Solar System.
I mean, the magnetosphere of Jupiter almost reaches the orbit
of Saturn. Now, there are other sources of charge particles
(44:13):
in Jupiter's orbit, including other Jovian moons and the Solar wind.
But according to the ESA, Jupiter's magnetosphere captures all of
these particles and then speeds them up like it's a
literal particle accelerator, creating intense radiation belts out of these
accelerated particles, and i OWE is a major contributor. These
radiation belts pose an additional obstacle to missions to any
(44:37):
missions to the Jovian moons, particularly any possible future missions
that might feature live crew members, because this would expose
them to lethal doses of radiation for like hours at
a time potentially, and it imposes a risk to equipment
as well. So any mission through these belts requires, on
one hand, additional navigation precision to avoid as the ESA
(44:58):
points out, low latitude orbital paths around Jupiter, and also
you just need to have additional shielding and protection for
any gear because I've read that it essentially would be
it would be a case where whatever kind of equipment
was aboard one of these craft, it would encounter as
much radiation as a terrestrial satellite would endure over the
(45:21):
course of multiple decades. And Joe I included a couple
images here in the notes for you. Here the sort
of highlight iOS plasma Taurus and shows shows us like
how it sort of features into the complex magnetosphere and
orbital ecosystem of Jupiter. Ah.
Speaker 3 (45:39):
Yeah, okay, So branching out from the poles we see
the magnetic field lines, but then closer in to of
course those extend out really far into space. But then
in closer to the planet we see the gold ring,
we see the ring of the atom or the ion Taurus.
And this is a lot of this, as you said,
(46:00):
stuff that is actually being ejected from the thin atmosphere
and uh, an orbit of io bi volcanic eruptions and
just goes off into space and ends up in orbit
not around Io, but around Jupiter.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Yeah. Yeah, so I found found this that this is
just another way in which IO stands out and I
think is rather fascinating. It's it's again, it's easy to
consider IO and think, Okay, well it's not It's maybe
not a top consideration for extraterdustrial life. It's not a
top consideration for some sort of uh you know, distant
(46:35):
future human colony. Uh. And it's not even like the
biggest moon. Maybe in your opinion it's not the most
impressive moon in the Jovian system, but when you look
at details like this, it's clear that it is a
major player in the Jovian system. Like it, it contributes
quite a bit. So it would be you would be
in great error if you were to completely dismiss Io
(46:57):
and be like, oh, it's not interesting it it doesn't
really do anything, etc. Like No, it's it's it's of
extreme importance.
Speaker 3 (47:04):
I want to meet the person who says it's not
interesting because it's not the biggest size matters not. Come on,
look at the volcanoes. I know it's got that island.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
There's a lot going on here, you know, maybe maybe
not life, but maybe life. As we discussed in the
last episode, we just don't know. There's a lot more
to learn from Io, that's for sure.
Speaker 3 (47:27):
Did I tell you I've been thinking about that big
island in the middle of Loki Potera as the island
of Death.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
That would be something if it had the like the
signature booklan topography going on there. Once we get some
more detailed imagery, all right, well, we're going to go
ahead and close the book on Io. Here you know,
at least until more data presents itself and provokes us
to come back and take another look. But in the meantime,
(47:54):
we'd love to hear from all of you out there
if you have feedback on anything we've discussed in these episodes. Wise,
are there other moons that we've covered in the past,
Jovian moons, the moons of Saturn and so forth that
you think deserve a second, more detailed examination on the show.
If so, write in let us know and we will
(48:15):
consider giving it a go.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
I feel like the obvious candidate is Titan, right, Yeah,
here we go deep.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
On Titan, Yeah, or you know whatever, the biggest one is, right,
all right? Just a reminder to everybody's stuff to Blow
your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on
Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (48:40):
Huge thanks as always to our regular audio producer JJ Posway,
and shout out special thanks today to our guest producer
Max Williams. Thank you so much. Max. If you would
like To get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at con Intact. That's Stuff to Blow Your Mind
(49:02):
dot com.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
(49:37):
M
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Today is Saturday,
Valentine's Day apparently, and we have a vault episode for you.
This is going to be The Burning Mountains of Io,
Part three. It originally published two thirteen, twenty twenty five.
It is part three of three. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with the
third and final part in our series on Jupiter's moon Io,
the innermost and third largest of Jupiter's four Galilean moons
and the most volcanic body in our solar system. Years ago,
we did a multi part series on the moons of
Jupiter at large, but this time we wanted to come
(01:03):
back and do a deeper focus on Io, in particular
to explore its own peculiar Hadean prodigies, because it really is,
as I've said in the previous two parts, I think
probably one of the most dramatic places in our Solar system,
certainly beyond Earth. Now, if you haven't heard the previous
two parts yet, I would recommend you go back and listen.
(01:25):
Listen to those in order, but to briefly recap, we
started off by talking in detail about some really eerie
and thrilling images of the surface of Io, mostly based
on data collected in twenty twenty three and twenty twenty
four by NASA's Juno mission. These images highlighted a lot
of the really enigmatic features of the Moon's topography, including
(01:47):
these gargantuan thorn like mountains and volcanic highlands, huge fields
blanketed and yellow sulfurous frost, Vast lakes of molten lava
constantly overturning with ways waves, giant lava flows spreading in
some cases hundreds of kilometers, forever resurfacing the Moon and
erasing all the scars of its history. We also talked
(02:10):
about the physical ironies of the conditions on Io, including
the fact that it is at once deep cold due
to its extremely thin sulfur dioxide atmospheres inability to trap heat.
Doesn't really have much of an atmosphere, can't trap heat there,
but of course in places it is unimaginably hot due
of course, two volcanic eruptions. According to a volcanologist we
(02:33):
discussed in Part one a single one of the Moon's volcanoes,
the lava lake known as Loki Petera, which we did
do a little focus on, that was the one that
has has a big island in the middle of it
actually has a number of islands, but one big old
island in the middle, which which shall not be named.
That one volcano emits more heat than all of Earth's
(02:55):
volcanoes combined, which is a pretty startling fact. We also
talked in previous parts a bit very briefly about the
historical exploration of Io, including Carl Sagan's account of the
discoveries made by the voyager one Probe in nineteen seventy nine.
We talked about the character from Greek myth that provides
Io its name, about how the story of Io was
(03:18):
told by Avid and other ancient authors, and how in
ancient times the character of Io was said to overlap
or interact with other religious figures, such as the Egyptian
goddess Isis. In Part two, we discussed when and how
Io tends to pop up in science fiction storytelling. There's
sometimes what at least feels like a dearth of Io stories,
(03:41):
and then we talked about a mystery regarding images of
so called ridges on the Moon's surface, which paradoxically look
extremely similar to wind driven sand dunes on Earth and Mars.
This is paradoxical because of the tenuous, barely their atmosphere
of Io, which wouldn't see to be thick enough to
support the winds needed to make dunes. And then we
(04:04):
got into a paper that offered a likely solution to
this mystery. Finally, in the last episode, we talked about
the possibility of life on Io Io being a blasted, cursed, irradiated, waterless, sulfurous,
freezing cold, searing hot kind of nightmare ball, a place
from the video game Doom I would not seem to
be a good place to look for signs of extraterrestrial life,
(04:27):
but if it were to exist there, we talked about
some astrobiology speculation on where and how that life might persist.
And now we are back today to round out the discussion,
talk about a few more things that's right, all new
things quite true in fact. To kick things off today,
I want to talk about a pretty new research paper.
I think it was just published a couple of months
(04:48):
ago in the journal Nature, I believe in December twenty
twenty four. Which addresses a longstanding mystery about the interior
of Io. We've talked about the mysteries of its surface,
but now we're going to talk about mysteries of what
lies inside. So this paper was by park at All
and it's called Io's Tidle Response Precludes a shallow magma Ocean,
(05:11):
again published in Nature twenty twenty four, So a bit
of context about this. For the past four decades or so,
there has been a question about what powered the volcanic
eruptions on Io, and it was long suspected for a
number of reasons, but not confirmed, that underneath the surface
(05:34):
of the Moon there lay a vast planetary magma ocean,
sometimes thought to be maybe roughly fifty kilometers deep below
the surface, a vast ocean of liquid magma stretching around
the planet, which found release points at each of Io's
roughly four hundred active volcanoes. So this was long suspected
(05:56):
by some researchers to be the case. But this new paper,
published in Nature in twenty twenty four has a group
of researchers who took information gathered by the NASA Juno
mission and used it to argue that the magma ocean
hypothesis cannot be correct, and instead each volcano is probably
(06:17):
powered by its own distinct magma chamber, and I'm going
to try to explain how we get there. So a reminder,
going back to part one of this series, volcanic activity
on Io was not directly detected until the discovery of
a volcanic plume by NASA JPL scientist Linda Morabito in
nineteen seventy nine. The image was found in actually navigational
(06:42):
images created by the Voyager one spacecraft. Volcanism had been
hypothesized by the astrophysicist Stanton Peel beforehand, but this was
the first time direct evidence was identified. But ever since
the erupting volcanoes were first discovered, there has been this
mystery about like what's inside the moon to feed the eruptions?
(07:04):
And I wanted to read a quote here by JUNO
principal investigator Scott Bolton, who is quoted in a NASA
press release about this new paper. Bolton summarizes it saying, quote,
since Mora Beido's discovery, planetary scientists have wondered how the
volcanoes were fed from the lava underneath the surface. Was
there a shallow ocean of white hot magma fueling the volcanoes,
(07:28):
or was their source more localized. We knew data from
Juno's two very close flybys could give us some insights
on how this tortured moon actually worked. So how did
they investigate this? Well? I thought this was pretty cool.
So the Juno spacecraft did flybys of Io in December
twenty twenty three and February twenty twenty four, and during
(07:50):
those close passes, Juno interfaced with an Earth based tool
called NASA's Deep Space Network, which is a network of
three equidistant ground based radio antennas on Earth. There's one
in California, there's one in Australia, and one in Spain.
And the ideas with this equidistant spacing of these antennas,
(08:12):
they always at least one of them can maintain contact
with something in space. You never have it going dark. Together,
these instruments were able to acquire high precision Doppler readings
to detect minute changes in Juno's acceleration, which was in
turn able to tell us things about the gravity of Io,
(08:33):
but the gravitational influence of Io, because it was primarily
Io's gravity that would have been affecting Juno's acceleration at
these moments. So essentially researchers were looking for how the
gravitational field of IO changes during its tidal stretching cycle.
More on that than just a minute, because that would
help us know how rigid the Moon is. A more
(08:56):
rigid IO would be consistent with a more solid interior,
but a more flexible IO would indicate a liquid magma
ocean underneath. Now on that sort of flexing and stretching cycle,
IO is in a very close orbit around Jupiter. The
average distance between the planet and the Moon is four
(09:17):
hundred and twenty two thousand kilometers over the course of
its roughly forty two point five hour orbits. Now, that
is not much further than the distance between the Earth
and the Moon, which is about three hundred and eighty
four thousand kilometers, except think of how big Jupiter is.
In the words of Scott Bolton, the junoprincipal investigator IO
(09:40):
is orbiting a monster and this has many different effects.
We've talked about some of them already, but a big
one is a gravitational effect. Gravity follows the inverse square law,
meaning that the attractive force between two objects in space
is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them,
(10:02):
and another way of thinking about that is, as you
get closer to a planet, the force of gravity asserted
on you rapidly becomes greater. So get a little bit
closer to Jupiter and you get pulled harder toward it.
A strange thing about Io is that, in addition to
being very close in orbit around a very massive planet,
(10:22):
the orbit of this moon is also not circular. It
is slightly elliptical, meaning that if you look down from
above the orbital plane, you're going to see the orbit
being slightly longer in one direction than another. It's a
little bit more oval shaped than a circle. This elliptical
orbit is actually because of regular gravitational influence by two
(10:46):
more of the Galilean moons, Europa and Ganymede. These moons
are in what's called an orbital resonance with Io, which
means that their orbits are sort of like small integer
multiples of the orbits of iOS. They frequently line up
in the same place as Io as they're going around
the planet, and the fact that they continually line up
(11:08):
in the same direction over and over means that they
sort of stretch Io's orbit in that one direction. So
the elliptical orbit of Io means that the distance between
Io and Jupiter keeps changing, And so as the distance
keeps changing, the strength of Jupiter's gravitational pull on Io
(11:28):
keeps changing.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Two.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
And this really affects the Moon because it's always the
case that the side of the Moon facing Jupiter experiences
a stronger pull than the side that's farther away. The
nearer side is pulled harder than the far side. But
because of the constantly changing distance between Io and Jupiter,
the difference between the pull on the far side and
(11:52):
the near side of the planet keeps changing too. And
this manifests as what planetary geologists might call tidal flexing.
It's a squeezing, stretching of the solid material that the
Moon is made of in the fluctuating gravitational field. You
can kind of just imagine this by by like holding
a rubber ball in your hand and just like squeezing
(12:14):
it over and over again. It's a it's a flexing
of the material that the moon is made of. Now, Rob,
did you ever do the thing in like the school
cafeteria when you were younger where you get one of those,
you know, cheap metal forks, cafeteria forks, and you bend
it back and forth a bunch of times, real fast,
until it gets hot.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
No, I never did this. I didn't even know this
was a thing. I mean, I mean, physically, I understand
why it's possible, but I didn't know it was a
thing that kids do.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
I guess it was the thing I did. I don't
know sure, is that are most forks supposed to bend
like that?
Speaker 1 (12:50):
You're using your hands right, not your mind?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
Yes, just hands, just hands. This this has got to
be possible only with like real bottom shelf cutlery. But yeah,
so you know, you flex a piece of metal back
and forth a bunch of times. Usually what you will
find is that the metal heats up. The flexing causes
a frictional force within the material that excites the atoms,
(13:13):
and it makes the metal hot or at least warm.
Similar principle here. The flexing of the Moon by the
changing gravitational field as it gets closer and farther away
from Jupiter causes frictional heating of the inside of the Moon,
and that heat is immense. It is so immense that
it melts parts of the Moon's interior, and this massive
(13:35):
build up of internal heat energy is released to the
surface through volcanic eruptions. But this brings us back to
the question we started with, what is the nature of
the subsurface magma source? To read from the paper in
Nature quote for decades, it has been speculated that this
extreme tidal heating may be sufficient to melt a substantial
(13:58):
fraction of Io's interior, plausibly forming a global subsurface magma ocean.
Many worlds are believed to have had magma oceans early
in their evolution, notably the early Moon referring to Earth's
moon there, notably the early Moon which is thought to
have had a shallow magma ocean in the first one
(14:19):
hundred million years, caused by the giant impact that birthed
the body, which that is not new information in this paper,
but that on its own is just a fascinating fact
to consider it, you know. So there is the main
theory of the origin of the current Earth and Moon
is the giant impact hypothesis. So the idea is that
(14:39):
roughly four and a half billion years ago, during the
formation of the Solar System, when the you know, the
planets were just accreting. There was a collision between the
early proto Earth and some kind of roughly Mars sized object,
and this collision caused a fracturing that eventually ended up
causing the the separation of the material that became the
(15:02):
Earth and became the Moon. So that's the common origin
of the Earth we have now and where the Moon
came from. And so the idea here is that for
the first one hundred million years or so after that,
the Moon probably had a global shallow magma ocean surrounded
by liquid by molten rockow would have been cool to see,
(15:25):
perhaps not physically cool, but anyway. So the authors cite
that as an example of a global shallow magma ocean
surrounding a planetary body or a moon, and then the
quote goes on to say Io's extreme volcanism strongly suggests
the existence of at least a partially molten interior. Whether
(15:46):
the interior contains a shallow global magma ocean has been
an outstanding question since the discovery of Io's volcanism. Now,
beyond these theoretical models, were there any recent experiments that
would have provided support for the idea of a global
magma ocean. I was looking into this, and it appears, yes,
(16:07):
there were some good reasons, some findings that pointed in
this direction. Apparently, the Galileo mission took some magnetic measurements
that were thought to be consistent with a shallow, shallow
reserve of global magma. And I also wanted to flag
another argument for the magma ocean. I came across in
a space dot com article by Keith Cooper, which pointed
(16:31):
out that previous data collected by the junomission had actually
enabled researchers to create the first global map of Io's
volcanic activity. Rob actually pasted a picture of this global
map in the outline for you to look at here.
And so it's got little color coded polka dots of
different energy levels of volcanic eruptions all over Io's surface.
(16:54):
The authors here assembled this map based on near infrared
signatures of Io's poll polar regions. In particular, data collected
by previous missions had already done some of this mapping,
I think, but had left us with an incomplete picture
of volcanic activity near the poles. And I was reading
a space dot Com article that quoted study author Ashley Davies,
(17:17):
a volcanologist, at NASA, JPL and Caltech Pasadena, and Davies
explained their findings by saying, quote, before this analysis, it
was thought that Io's polar volcanoes were fewer and more
powerful than at lower latitudes. We showed that polar volcanoes
are about as prevalent as at lower latitudes, and actually
(17:38):
with lower emitted power, suggesting smaller eruptions. And another thing
the researchers found is that these findings were interpreted by
computer modeling to lend support to the hypothesis of a
global subsurface magma ocean. So it seemed like this looked
good for the magma ocean.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Did they consider connecting these dots and seeing if it
made a pentagram or not, because that's generally what you
do in detective movies.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
It really does look like people should be putting tax
in and putting string between them, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Yeah? Yeah, say it all lines up with that unnamed island.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Yeah, well, that unnamed island is I'm sure going to
be right around one of the yellow dots here. In fact,
I think I see where Loki Ptera is, and yes
it is. In fact one of it is one of
the hottest types of dots, any pentangles, I'm not really
seeing it.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
If you want them bad enough, they will manifest.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
But anyway, coming back to the new Jono experiment, park
it all from twenty twenty four, So the author is
use the Doppler data from the JUNO flybys and the
Deep Space Network radio telescopes, as well as data previously
collected by the Galileo mission to try to look at
the tidal deformation of Io. And again remember they're looking
(18:51):
for if it's more, if it's stretching more, if it
seems more easily deformed, that probably means liquid magma ocean underneath.
And if it's more rigid, that probably means that it
is more solid underneath. And they concluded based on their
findings that Io could not have a global magma ocean
underneath its surface. Instead, the Moon must be mostly solid
(19:12):
with individual magma chambers driving the hundreds of volcanoes. The
authors of the Paperwright quote, our results indicate that tidal
forces do not universally create global magma oceans, which may
be prevented from forming owing to rapid melt ascent, intrusion
and eruption. So even strong tidal heating such as that
(19:34):
expected on several known exoplanets and super earths may not
guarantee the formation of magma oceans on moons or planetary bodies,
and rob I've got a little artist's rendition for you
to look at here. This is an artist's impression of
the interior of Io informed by these new findings. Does
not show a global magma ocean. Instead shows these the pockets,
(19:57):
these magma chambers that are leading up to the volcanoes
on the surface, some of these volcanoes being connected to
plumes that we see erupting far over the surface of
the planet. This has more the look of you know,
it's like when you see superheroes and movies that like
have the fire inside and you see their skin kind
of cracking and then the fire is ready to come out.
(20:19):
It looks like it's about to go supermode exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Yeah. Yeah, these kind of yeah, these deep I want
to describe them as veins because they don't really have
that kind of rooting pattern. But deep fissures, I guess
would be more glowing fissures would be the way to
describe them.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
And so perhaps one reason Io doesn't have a magma
ocean would be all of its volcanoes, they may in
fact be dissipating the heat that would otherwise melt the mantle.
The author's right in their conclusion quote. On Earth, deep
melts can be denser than the surrounding mantle and thus
remain sequestered. In a basal magma ocean. On io, pressures
(21:00):
are much lower, so mantle melts are expected to be
always less dense than the surrounding solid mantle. The melts
will tend to ascend, making maintenance of a deep magma
ocean dynamically problematic. Conversely, if the melts are dense, for example,
if sufficiently iron rich, although a deep magma ocean could
then form, it would be hard to explain how any
(21:23):
such melt would ascend and erupt. Thus, we conclude that
the volcanism seen on iosurface is not sourced from a
global magma ocean. So it seems like that interesting idea
is likely put to rest unless something causes us to
really reinterpret these results. But despite the magma reserves not
being part of a sort of global shared ocean in nature,
(21:46):
I still think that leaves the volcanoes and the plumes,
and the eruptions and the lava lakes no less fascinating
and charismatic.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Yeah. Yeah. Plus, you know, if you miss that, if
you miss that vision of what IO is, it's probably
out there somewhere else in the universe. So you can
just imagine that it's out there somewhere waiting.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
For you used to be present on our moon.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yeah yeah, it's somewhere else in time and space and
in time, maybe a lot closer than you thought. Now.
One of the features of the illustration that you showed me,
(22:31):
and certainly listeners can find various images that either depict
this or are actual captures of this. One of the
distinguishing features that you often see with IO is that
of these plumes coming up from its surface, a volcanic
eruption that is ejecting material into space. And it is
(22:52):
always kind of weird to look at because it feels
completely out of scale, like we're not used to seeing,
you know, we we've all seen images of volcanic eruptions,
and yes they can actually they can look quite alarming
from orbit, but this just looks These just look amazing
because the moon in profile has this plume coming off
(23:13):
of it, just this ridiculously far reaching plume of volcanic eruption,
and so that's what I want to explore here in
this next section, getting into like what exactly this is,
what does it mean for not only Io but for
the the basically the entire orbital realm of Jupiter itself.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
I totally agree with what you say about looking at
these plumes, that the plumes, even in real direct images
taken from reality, look fake. They look like they look
like art. The word photo can be misleading because the
instruments used to capture these images can be different. In nature,
it's not always just visual light. But but yeah, like
direct images of reality that we're looking at, but they're
(23:58):
that they look like a yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Yeah, like this is grotesque and ridiculous. But I'm reminded
of pimples. You know, usually in profile, you are not
going to notice a pimple, And if a pimple were
to burst on a person, you wouldn't see that in profile.
You wouldn't see like the silhouette of the eruption. And
if you were to see that, well, you would be
(24:21):
watching like an itchy and scratchy cartoon or a SpongeBob
cartoon or something. It would be a cartoon exaggeration of
reality and that's what the scale of these things really
looks like.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Yeah, that's right. We see plumes on Io that are
like somebody with a three inch high pimple that when
you pop it, it squirts like six feet off their body.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Yes, So what's going on here? Well, you know, here
on Earth we certainly have powerful volcanic eruptions as well,
we have in the past, and they occur periodically and
they will continue to occur. But we also have some
other things going for us that you don't find on
Io and you don't find everywhere else. In our Solar system.
(25:02):
We have a robust atmosphere, We have resulting wind resistance
and sufficient gravity to place the necessary escape velocity beyond
what even a very powerful terrestrial eruption is capable of reaching.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Right, So that escape velocity number is going to mean
that our volcanoes, they might erupt quite powerfully, but they're
not blasting stuff out into space so that it never
comes back, or not much stuff certainly.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Yeah, I've read that while terrestrial volcanoes can't really blast
things into orbit, they can reach really high into the atmosphere,
in arguably touching space. For instance, the twenty twenty two
Hanga Tonga volcanic eruption supposedly shot water vapor up that
high to where it was essentially touching space. But it's
(25:50):
not quite what we're seeing with Io at all.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Right, And even if it were to go into space
and go into orbit, that still wouldn't be a scape velocity.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Right right. Yeah, you've got to get all the way
out of there, you got to. It's got to be
a complete breakup with the planet, not one of these things.
We'll continue to see each other socially. No, no, no,
you've got to be out of there.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Volcanoes are not doing that.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
So this thinking about this led me to, you know,
get into escape velocity uh here on Earth and elsewhere,
and ways to escape it. You know. The most obvious
way to do it is, of course, in a rocket.
That's what we're used to seeing with our Earth space technology.
The escape velocity on Earth is eleven point one eighty
(26:35):
six kilometers per second. That is, that's that's going to
be a higher velocity than is necessary for any of
the other inner planets. On Earth's own moon it's two
point thirty eight kilometers per second, and on Io the
number I've seen is two point five five eight so
(26:55):
just to give you a little frame of reference for
what we're talking about here again coming back to what
does Earth have that a lot of these other suspects
don't you know? It has the gravity, it has the
robust atmosphere, and so forth. So this all adds up
to a greater necessary escape velocity for anything that is
leaving the surface of the planet or any point within
(27:17):
the atmosphere of the planet and hoping to free itself
of our orbital dominion. Now, one thing, I want to
go ahead and get out of the way at the
top here there, I think a lot of people have
probably heard the legendary manhole shot into space story via
operation plumb Bob. These were atomic tests in nineteen fifty seven.
(27:40):
The idea here was that you had these test wells
for atomic detonations with a metal cap on the top,
essentially a manhole cover, and at least one of these
blasted the cap off, and it was said that it
achieved such velocity. In fact, I think the number that
(28:00):
is often cited is six times the necessary escape velocity,
and therefore flew off into space and is potentially still
out there well. According to a twenty twenty two snop's
article by Bethania Palma. There's nothing actually out there to
back this up. This all seems to stem from a
comment by Robert Brownly, who worked on the project, who
(28:25):
remarked that the manhole cover in question would have been
blasted off at six times the necessary escape velocity. It
apparently went flying, but that's all that's really known. We
don't know if it was launched into space, and if
it was, we have no records or recording of it.
I think it's also been mentioned that it's possible that
it would have burnt up on the way up as well,
(28:48):
So you know, we have to consider all these options.
But there's no clear evidence that this thing actually made
it into orbit or beyond orbit and so forth.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Yeah, all we actually know is that this was a piece,
a solid piece of metal that was hit from below
with tremendous energy. But we don't know exactly what happened
to that matter and energy afterwards. What its journey was
question mark right now. Of course, we already mentioned rockets.
Rockets are you know, we can compare rockets to volcanoes
(29:19):
in that you know, the rocket is taking advantage of
a very explosive chemical reaction in order to propel this,
you know, tower of steel and so forth upwards through
the atmosphere, and you know it's and rocket science has
come a long way. It's ultimately a lot more dependable
than trying to blast into space on a volcano, which
(29:41):
again probably wouldn't give you the exactly the push you needed. Anyway,
I wonder if it's been tried.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
It you'd have to be you'd have to be so patient.
I don't think. I don't think it's just maybe there's
some sort of sci fi scenario, or it would make
sense if you know of a science fiction tale which
someone uses a volcano to escape a planet's orbit, do
write in and tell us about it. Now, in terms
of just using explosions, though, and explosive events to potentially
(30:14):
transfer into orbit or beyond orbit, we do have to
mention Project Ryan here. This has come up on the
show in the past because it is an early concept
of how we might achieve interplanetary travel. It was a
nuclear pulse spaceship concept from the nineteen fifties and sixties.
(30:38):
I think a lot of you may be familiar with
this essentially built around the idea was built around the
concept you could propel a craft through space via a
series of nuclear detonations behind the craft. Not to be
confused with nuclear thermal rockets such as the Nerva project,
(30:58):
in that you'd have a nuclear reaction that was heating
fuel rather than depending on a chemical reaction to do so.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
So the nerve rocket would still be a reaction drive,
but it would just be that the heating is from
nuclear sources.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Correct. Yeah, And that one was never tested in space,
nor was Orion. But the Orion program is like, let's
keep throwing atomic bombs behind the ship, allowing them to explode,
thus propelling our ship onward and onward through space with
each blast like pushing up against a blast plate on
the rear of the vessel. An idea that I've just
(31:36):
always found. I mean, it's it's it's preposterous and yet reasonable,
amazing in its own right, and you know, in in
Yourself to the Stars, Yeah, yeah, and yeah, it's it's
it's one that I've come back to a few different times.
But it's one of Sagan wrote about as well. Actually
(32:00):
up an old like press briefing where someone asked Sagan
about it, and you know, he pointed out he'd written
about it in Cosmos or I don't remember if you'd
written about it in Cosmos or you just discussed it
on the television series. But he pointed out like, Okay, well,
this is actually not a bad way to go ahead
and get rid of some of our atomic weapons. Let's
use them to propel a spaceship. But of course there
(32:22):
are all these various hazards to such a technique as well.
Some of these we'll get into here in the discussion.
So I was, you know, I was mostly familiar with
the concepts involved here, the potential benefits and the downsides.
But one thing that I didn't quite realize is that
early models of the project oriyon nuclear pulse spaceship during
(32:46):
the fifties and sixties actually considered it not only for
propelling a vehicle through space, but for using it in
liftoff in order to achieve escape velocity from Earth.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
WHOA, I don't think I'd ever thought of it that way.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeah. I was reading about this in a couple of sources.
One was in a Nuclear Pulse Propulsion Orion and Beyond
by Schmidt at All for NASA, and they pointed out
that early drafts of the proposal called for a bullet
light capsule to be launched from the ground from the
ground via an atomic detonation, likely from a Nevada nuclear
(33:21):
test site. The mass of the vehicle on takeoff would
have been on the order of ten thousand tons, most
of which would have gone into orbit. At takeoff, the
zero point one kiloton yield pulse units would be ejected
at a frequency of one per second. As the vehicle accelerated,
the rate would slow down and the yield would increase
(33:42):
until twenty kiloton pulses would have been detonated every ten seconds.
The vehicle would fly straight up until it cleared the
atmosphere so as to minimize radioactive contamination. This is one
of the big hazards and downsides to this whole concept
is that you would it would entail detonating multiple, multiple
(34:02):
atomic weapons in this model within the atmosphere. But even
if you weren't using that within its atmosphere to achieve
lift off, if you were going to the program where okay,
you know, once you get your spaceship away from Earth,
then you can start dropping bombs in order to accelerate.
Even then you're still causing all of these detonations, and
(34:24):
then what happens when you reach your destination. There are
some models that were outlined that would call for detonating
bombs as you landed, thus like you know, nuking the
landing site ahead of your arrival, and if there are
people on board, whether they're gonna have to deal with
with the literal fallout of all of that. The original
(34:44):
concept was created by Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson, and
Freeman Dyson's son, George Dyson, claimed historian of science, wrote
about all this in the book Project Orion, The True
Story of the Atomic Spaceship, and he points out quote
these early four thousand ton ground launch versions of Orion
(35:06):
specified the ejection of about eight hundred bombs raging and
yield from zero point fifteen kilotons at sea level to
five kilotons in space to reach a three hundred mile
orbit around Earth. Points out that each bomb would have
weighed around half a ton. Less yield would be necessary
at lower altitudes, since the thicker air itself would absorb
(35:28):
energy and add to the kick against that plate. But
then you would need more yield. You'd have to steadily
increase the yield of the detonations as the vessel is
propelled upwards, and this would have all required like tight
precision and exactly how you're detonating these bombs, and even
how you're getting them back there underneath the ship, like
(35:49):
is it a trapdoor or is there some sort of
a you know, some sort of a targeted rocket system
that launches them alongside the vessel and then back underneath it.
You know, you would have to work out all of
those problems. So that's about eight hundred bombs. The original
design called for about two thousand bombs or two thousand
pulse units, far more than needed to reach orbit according
(36:11):
to their calculations, but that was because they'd set their
sites pretty high. Their slogan was Mars by nineteen sixty five,
Saturn by nineteen seventy, and they were talking about like
crews of one hundred and fifty people. So this was
a really ambitious concept. Obviously, this is not the way
it all worked out.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
I mean I said this in a totally different context earlier.
But there's a cartoonishness to this. It kind of reads
like a joke.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah, it does, and I think that's one of the
reasons it resonates so well. It's like this interesting perversion
of the accumulation of atomic weapons, though not necessarily a
negative pervert, like the accumulation of atomic weapons is already
a perversion in many respects. But the idea of then
taking them all and using them to propel a spaceship
(36:59):
to another planet, you know, with such ambition, it you know,
it's ultimately more attractive. Like Sagan said, it's like, well,
that's one way to get rid of the weapons, or
at least that's the way he put it at one point.
(37:24):
Now the concept here continued to evolve again, they ended
up moving away from the idea of it potentially blasting
off of the surface of the Earth like this via
atomic weapon detonations. It had many powerful supporters, but it
never came to fruition for a variety of reasons, including cost,
including risk, and of course including international treaties about nuclear testing.
(37:47):
George Dyson points out that, yeah, you had these had
various drawbacks to such a program, including the idea that
if you were going to use detonations while potentially a
landing a ship in another world, again, you would be
pre contaminating the landing site. So even if you even
if that wasn't going to make it too you know,
radioactive for then humans to venture out on the surface
(38:09):
of this destination world. You're still messing with what you
were going to explore to begin with. You know, uh
so so many different reasons to not go in this direction.
Now you might be wondering, was there another way to
get something into orbit from Earth's surface without some sort
of an explosion. Well, there has been research into the
use of centrifugial force, and such research actually continues at
(38:33):
least as as a rocket aid to decrease the dependence
on traditional rockets. You know, you can think essentially like
slingshots in terms of like the basic fundamentals here. This
is the sort of thing we could potentially come back
and do a more dedicated episode on this idea, because
again they're there. There as at least one company out
(38:54):
there that continues doing a lot of well funded work
in this area. Now elsewhere in speculation and in science fiction,
there are some ideas related to directed panspermia to consider,
so directed PAMs spermias, of course, they this would entail
the intentional seeding of other worlds with life, and in
(39:15):
some creative takes on what this might look like, it
might entail some manner of biological propulsion, maybe some sort
of biocannon that enables a seed of some sort to
escape from one world's gravity, drift through space and find
another world. And we actually saw a vision of what
this might look like in a recent film that we
discussed on Weird House Cinema, Beyond the Mind's Eye.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Oh, that's right, with the yon Hammer soundtrack, It's like
the second or third track on there is the one
that the seeds blasting into space and then we see
them form. And what was the deal with that? Like?
Why do I associate that with a cover of Black
Sabbath's Planet Caravan.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Because it was used as a music video for that
cover the Planet Caravan. Yeah, which kind of shakes out,
kind of makes sense. Now is this at all feasible?
I don't know. Again, I think it comes down to
what sort of world are you attempting to escape with
this seed? You know, what's the gravity like, what's the
atmosphere like and so forth. Now I haven't seen this
(40:22):
movie in ages, but I believe the bugs in the
nineteen ninety seven Starship Troopers movie also have something like this.
I think they're called plasma bugs in that and some
sort of organic cannon system.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
Right, biological artillery. Yeah, there's some big bugs that kind
of bend over and they like eject something out of
their backside that goes up into orbit and it takes
out the capital ships.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
All right, So some maybe some sort of weaponized version
of something that might otherwise be used for pan spermic.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
Purposes possibly, who knows.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Now, there's another major player in the world of science
fiction biothreats, and that's the Tyrannids and the Warhammer forty
thousand universe. These are if you're not familiar with these,
they're kind of there's a little bit of zenomorph to them,
except they are a spacefaring species. They have big, big
leviathan bioships and they arrive on worlds and they invade
them and eventually like turn all the bio they convert
(41:21):
all the biomass on the planet. But then they have
to get it off the planet. And interestingly enough, unless
I'm mistaken, they don't have any kind of way of
like launching it directly back up with their you know,
entirely biological civilization. Instead, they depend on something called capillary towers,
(41:41):
which are like organic space elevators. So they just have
the big ships in orbit suck it all up back
off the surface of the planet, which I guess is
one way to potentially do this.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
Sounds kind of necromonger style.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a certain necromongernous to them, or
there's a certain tyrannid nature. Did the neckromongers one way
or the other? Including an image an illustration here of
what this might look like, you know, the big coiling
ambilical cord going from the planet's surface up to some
sort of you know, horrifying living alien vessel.
Speaker 3 (42:18):
Yikes, give me out.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
But anyway, back to the real world, back to volcanoes. Yeah, so,
while Earth volcanoes can't blast things into orbit space, volcanoes,
including ice volcanoes, which I think we've talked about on
the show before, absolutely can and the volcanoes of Io,
dealing with much less gravity and atmosphere, can easily jet
their contents into orbit, and not only into their orbit,
(42:42):
but into the orbit of Jupiter. Ah.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
Well, this actually brings us back to the one of
the first things we talked about in the series, when
we were discussing Carl Sagan's comments about what scientists knew
as the voyager probe was approaching Jupiter before they actually
had to direct evidence of the volcanoes. One of the
indications that there might be something strange going on with
(43:05):
Io was he said that they had already detected a
huge doughnut shaped tube of atoms in orbit around Jupiter,
basically within the sort of the same position as the
orbit of the Moon. Io made up of just like
just isolated atoms of things like sulfur and potassium and sodium.
And for some reason that's just going around the planet.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
Why that's right. Yeah, These eruptions create a toroidal or
doughnut shaped cloud of charged particles that follow Io's orbit
and wraps part of the way around Jupiter. It's also
referred to as a plasma taurus, and it produces ultra
violet light, intense radiation, and as Io orbits Jupiter, it
(43:49):
travels through the torrent, generating an enormous electrical current, thus
amplifying Jupiter's magnetosphere. So the ioplasma Taurus play a major
role in strengthening the most powerful magnetosphere in the Solar System.
I mean, the magnetosphere of Jupiter almost reaches the orbit
of Saturn. Now, there are other sources of charge particles
(44:13):
in Jupiter's orbit, including other Jovian moons and the Solar wind.
But according to the ESA, Jupiter's magnetosphere captures all of
these particles and then speeds them up like it's a
literal particle accelerator, creating intense radiation belts out of these
accelerated particles, and i OWE is a major contributor. These
radiation belts pose an additional obstacle to missions to any
(44:37):
missions to the Jovian moons, particularly any possible future missions
that might feature live crew members, because this would expose
them to lethal doses of radiation for like hours at
a time potentially, and it imposes a risk to equipment
as well. So any mission through these belts requires, on
one hand, additional navigation precision to avoid as the ESA
(44:58):
points out, low latitude orbital paths around Jupiter, and also
you just need to have additional shielding and protection for
any gear because I've read that it essentially would be
it would be a case where whatever kind of equipment
was aboard one of these craft, it would encounter as
much radiation as a terrestrial satellite would endure over the
(45:21):
course of multiple decades. And Joe I included a couple
images here in the notes for you. Here the sort
of highlight iOS plasma Taurus and shows shows us like
how it sort of features into the complex magnetosphere and
orbital ecosystem of Jupiter. Ah.
Speaker 3 (45:39):
Yeah, okay, So branching out from the poles we see
the magnetic field lines, but then closer in to of
course those extend out really far into space. But then
in closer to the planet we see the gold ring,
we see the ring of the atom or the ion Taurus.
And this is a lot of this, as you said,
(46:00):
stuff that is actually being ejected from the thin atmosphere
and uh, an orbit of io bi volcanic eruptions and
just goes off into space and ends up in orbit
not around Io, but around Jupiter.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Yeah. Yeah, so I found found this that this is
just another way in which IO stands out and I
think is rather fascinating. It's it's again, it's easy to
consider IO and think, Okay, well it's not It's maybe
not a top consideration for extraterdustrial life. It's not a
top consideration for some sort of uh you know, distant
(46:35):
future human colony. Uh. And it's not even like the
biggest moon. Maybe in your opinion it's not the most
impressive moon in the Jovian system, but when you look
at details like this, it's clear that it is a
major player in the Jovian system. Like it, it contributes
quite a bit. So it would be you would be
in great error if you were to completely dismiss Io
(46:57):
and be like, oh, it's not interesting it it doesn't
really do anything, etc. Like No, it's it's it's of
extreme importance.
Speaker 3 (47:04):
I want to meet the person who says it's not
interesting because it's not the biggest size matters not. Come on,
look at the volcanoes. I know it's got that island.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
There's a lot going on here, you know, maybe maybe
not life, but maybe life. As we discussed in the
last episode, we just don't know. There's a lot more
to learn from Io, that's for sure.
Speaker 3 (47:27):
Did I tell you I've been thinking about that big
island in the middle of Loki Potera as the island
of Death.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
That would be something if it had the like the
signature booklan topography going on there. Once we get some
more detailed imagery, all right, well, we're going to go
ahead and close the book on Io. Here you know,
at least until more data presents itself and provokes us
to come back and take another look. But in the meantime,
(47:54):
we'd love to hear from all of you out there
if you have feedback on anything we've discussed in these episodes. Wise,
are there other moons that we've covered in the past,
Jovian moons, the moons of Saturn and so forth that
you think deserve a second, more detailed examination on the show.
If so, write in let us know and we will
(48:15):
consider giving it a go.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
I feel like the obvious candidate is Titan, right, Yeah,
here we go deep.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
On Titan, Yeah, or you know whatever, the biggest one is, right,
all right? Just a reminder to everybody's stuff to Blow
your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on
Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (48:40):
Huge thanks as always to our regular audio producer JJ Posway,
and shout out special thanks today to our guest producer
Max Williams. Thank you so much. Max. If you would
like To get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at con Intact. That's Stuff to Blow Your Mind
(49:02):
dot com.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
(49:37):
M
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