IO's volcano on a plane of sulphur

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."

Comments

Is it just me?

[Liquor]

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?

Erupting a plane???

[Figaro]

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

Re:Sulphur chemistry, and life on Io

[swright]

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.