Eruption on Io
There it goes again.
Gas and rock were catapulted hundreds of kilometers into space as
Jupiter's most volatile moon,
Io, showed yet another
impressive volcanic display
in this just-released photograph by the
Hubble Space Telescope.
This time the culprit was
Pele, a volcano thought previously inactive
since photographed by the passing
Voyager
1 spacecraft in 1979.
The explosion is visible on
Io's lower left in
this
false-color photograph, taken in July 1996. Io's thin atmosphere and low
gravity allow
volcanic plumes to rise higher than they would
on Earth.