IO’s Newest Blast

Fig. 1 Big blasts on little Io (NASA photo)

New observations of Io catch large eruptions. These probably occur frequently but the moon of Jupiter is not continually monitered. As implied by William B Hubbard in ‘Planetary Interiors’, the large luminosity of Io (which just got greater) invalidates all the assumptions about the Galilean moons in the ‘standard model’ of the solar system. The model says that the great heat of Io is due to the “tidal tug-of-war” between Io, Europa and Ganymede, thought to be maintained by the tidal effect of Jupiter (a gas giant). But gaseous planets cannot exert any tidal effect. Hubbard even suggests this in terms of a Qj=infinity (Q is the reciprocal of the ‘lead angle’ by which a body exerts a tug on an orbiting body). If jupiter has a tidal effect, the heat of Io must be generated by this effect, but assuming Io has been radiating as much as it is today, for 4.5 billion years gives a Q for Io = 1, which is physically impossible. It continually amazes me that thousands of scientists understand these contradictions but cannot move outside the envelope which they were forced into to get their PhDs.

Of course cyclic catastrophism explains the truth – that the Galilean moons are just the left-over mass which did not escape the gravity of Jupiter when proto-Venus was created by an incredible impact, exponentially increased by fusion in the frozen, solid methane gas hydrate (plus all the heavy elements in their nucleogenesis proportions) which comprises the body of Jupiter, and entered their orbital resonances only 6,000 years ago. The moons then essentially received a cosmic paint job from a great jet that continued to shoot from the impact crater on the whirling Jupiter for about six more millennia. Because this jet of hot gases declined so slowly the outer moon Callisto is frozen solid, its paint job a bunch of craters, Ganemede is also full of craters but was hotter when the bodies formed from the jet hit, and the craters sort of slouch. Europa got so much heat from the jet that only the heavy elements could condense on its surface early on and only toward the end could all the water at its orbit condense on its surface forming its water/ice covering. The heat in its interior is the reason there is liquid water below the ice. Io was exposed longest to the hot jet and the radiation from Jupiter, resulting in its volcanic surface. Io and proto-Venus are sort of hot brothers, sons of Jupiter.