NASA’s Juno mission may have been bound for Jupiter at first, but in its expanded mission, the spacecraft is observing the gas giant’s moons and making some pretty interesting discoveries. His latest invention? Jupiter’s Moon Io covered with “fire-breathing” lava lakes.

Using the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument, an Italian space agency project initially used to make observations Jupiter’s thick cloudsJuno took infrared images of these lakes on Io’s surface, showing rings of hot lava surrounding a cooler crust. The rings in the images are bright white and have temperatures ranging from 450 to 1,350 degrees Fahrenheit (232 to 732 degrees Celsius). The rest of the lake is much cooler, hovering around minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 43 degrees Celsius).

“We now have a picture of the most common type of volcanism on Io: huge lava lakes where magma rises and falls,” said Juno co-investigator Alessandro Mura of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome. said. expression“The lava crust is forced against the lake walls, creating the typical lava ring seen in Hawaiian lava lakes.”

A leading hypothesis is that magma rises in these lava lakes, causing the lakes to rise and fall. When the crust contacts the walls of the lake, which are hundreds of meters high, friction erodes it, revealing lava along the edge of the lake. A secondary hypothesis suggests that magma rose in the middle of the lake, pushing the crust outwards until it sank along the edge of the lake, re-exposing the lava and forming these lava rings.

Researchers still have a lot to learn about Io, especially when it comes to Juno’s infrared images. “We’re just beginning to examine the JIRAM results from the December 2023 and February 2024 flybys of Io,” Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement.

“Combining these new results with Juno’s long-term campaign to monitor and map volcanoes at Io’s never-before-seen north and south poles, JIRAM is proving to be one of the most valuable tools for studying how this troubled world works.”