AFTER five years of watching Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, scientists have confirmed that it is a violent place. But they were surprised to find that most of the fireworks are confined to just a few places on the moon’s surface.
Paul Geissler from the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, and his team compared successive photos of Io, taken by the Galileo spacecraft between 1996 and 2001 as it explored Jupiter and its moons. Because there are no impact craters visible on Io, its surface must regenerate very fast, so the scientists expected to see changes all over the moon.…
