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IO's volcano on a plane of sulphur

Posted by chrisd on from the have-you-checked-discoverys-orbit-lately dept.

blamanj writes: "NASA a just released new pictures from the Galileo mission that show a volcano erupting in a vast sulphurous plane. The pictures of Tupan Patera show a field of yellow sulphur deposits, red heat, and black deposits of fresh lava. It's something to behold."

6 comments

  1. I don't mean to be gross, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    but that crater looks very similar to a boil I once had on my leg.

  2. Is it just me? by Liquor · · Score: 1
    Is it just me, or does the photo not actually match the description given?
    the Sun illuminates the surface from the upper right
    I know I'm nitpicking here, but as far as I can tell, it looks like the illumination is just from the right.
    In the center is a large area that must be higher than the rest of the crater floor because it has not been covered by the dark lavas
    If the illumination is from the right, then looking at the edge of the 'large area in the center', it seems that perhaps this is below the level of the surrounding darker zone. To my untrained eye, it seems to appear as if the center is a yellowish hued liquid (they did say the red had significant IR in it) with a darker yellow (and occasionally greenish) skin on it, and that liquid and skin is flowing to, and out a space in the middle of the straight side to the bottom left of the picture.

    The red areas almost seem to be a reddish mist that rises somewhere near the top of the central area, and drifts toward the bottom right.

    I know that the top of the cliffs at the bottom of the picture are a similar red, and that solid sulphur does not float on top of liquid sulphur, but no matter how I rotate the image, I simply cannot seem to get my eyes to convince my brain that the central area is higher. Does it seem that way to anyone else?
    --

    Liquor
    Sanity is a highly overrated commodity.
  3. Erupting a plane??? by Figaro · · Score: 1

    Now that's confusing.....I believe it's erupting a 'plain'.

    --
    :wq
  4. Sulphur chemistry, and life on Io by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sulphur seems to have very rich and subtle chemical properties, as can be guessed from the variety of colors in Tupan Pateraon and elsewhere on Io. Any chemistry write-up on sulphur will tell you that sulphur atoms can make 2,4,6 or 8 bonds and that sulphur has many solid and liquid forms.

    So if you're open minded, it's conceivable to imagine life based on sulphur instead of carbon/water. Could Io harbor sulphur-based life? It looks like a promising place, with all these volcanos stirring the soup. "But Io is cold" scientists exclaim. So what? Life does not depend on temperature, but on the richness of the available chemical reactions. "But Io is in a bath of radiation". So what? Life would be safe deeper underground. And Io has a far side always pointing away from Jupiter, which probably has more gentle radiation levels.

    So interesting stuff could be going on right now on Io. Let's hope that in 2 centuries the Galileo probe doesn't enter history as the probe that "could have detected life, but didn't because no one in charge of the mission even thought about it".

    1. Re:Sulphur chemistry, and life on Io by swright · · Score: 1

      AFAIK the problems with sulphur (and silicon and the others...) is that while they're more flexible with their bonds than the average atom, they can't hold long, complex molecular structures in a stable way - i.e. you couldn't string them together to make the equivilents of amino acids or any complex proteins.