Space.com contributing writer Stefanie Waldek is a self-taught space nerd and aviation geek who is passionate about all things spaceflight and astronomy.
NASA's Juno mission might have originally been all about Jupiter, but its extended mission has the spacecraft observing the gas giant's moons — and it's making some pretty interesting discoveries. Its latest find? The Jovian moon
Using its Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper instrument, a project by the Italian Space Agency originally used to peer beneath's surface, which show hot rings of lava surrounding a cooler crust. In the images, the rings are bright white with a thermal signature between 450 and 1,350 degrees Fahrenheit . The rest of the lake is much cooler, measuring at some minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit .
"We now have an idea of what is the most frequent type of volcanism on Io: enormous lakes of lava where magma goes up and down," Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator from the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, said in a."The lava crust is forced to break against the walls of the lake, forming the typical lava ring seen in Hawaiian lava lakes."
The leading hypothesis is that magma undergoes upwelling in these lava lakes, causing the lakes to rise and fall. When the crust touches the lake's walls — which can be hundreds of meters tall — the friction causes it to break, exposing the lava along the edge of the lake.A secondary hypothesis suggests that magma wells up in the middle of the lake, pushing the crust outward until it sinks along the edge of the lake, again exposing the lava and forming those lava rings.
With a background in travel and design journalism, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University, she specializes in the budding space tourism industry and Earth-based astrotourism. In her free time, you can find her watching rocket launches or looking up at the stars, wondering what is out there. Learn more about her work at
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