Jupiter’s four Galilean moons contain different amounts of water. The giant planet’s bygone brilliance could be why.
and crater-laden Callisto . The constitutions of these four bodies obey a trend: The more distant the moon from Jupiter, the more ice-rich its body is.
Bierson and his colleagues hypothesized this pattern was a legacy of Jupiter’s past radiance. The team used computers to simulate how an infant Jupiter may have warmed its moons, starting with Io, the closest of the four. During its first few million years, Io’s surface temperature may have exceeded 26° Celsius under Jupiter’s glow, Bierson said. “That’s Earthlike temperatures.”
Any ice present on Io at that time, roughly 4.5 billion years ago, probably would have melted into an ocean. That water would have progressively evaporated into an atmosphere. And that atmosphere, hardly restrained by the moon’s weak gravity, would have readily escaped into space. In just a few million years, Io could have lost as much water as Ganymede may hold today, which may be more than 25 times the amount in Earth’s oceans.
A coruscant Jupiter probably didn’t remove significant amounts of ice from Europa or Ganymede, the researchers found, unless Jupiter was brighter than simulated or the moons orbited closer than they do today.Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at
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