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Huge Volcanic Eruption Observed on Io

Posted by michael on from the things-that-go-boom dept.

minesweeper writes "Astronomers at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii recently monitored the largest volcanic eruption ever observed on Jupiter's moon Io. The eruption took place in February 2001, though image analysis was only recently completed by a team of University of California, Berkeley, astronomers. More info is available from the Berkeley press release, and an image is available here."

1 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. Re:why so long? by oni · · Score: 5, Informative

    Could someone please explain why it took so long to analyze the data?

    Probably because the researchers had a lot of projects to work on.

    To answer the next logical question "Why weren;t the images released earlier?"

    Telescope time is booked years in advance. A lot of work goes into preparing and submitting the proposals for the research that is to be conducted. As a result, when the images are taken, they are not released to the general public. The scientists that did all the work to take the images are allowed the courtesy of working on the images themselves.

    So, these guys got a picture of an eruption. They did a lot of work analyzing it and are now (finally) ready to submit their findings to the scientific community. Hopefully, their findings are valid as well as valuable - that will be determined by peer review.

    The alternative is this: The image could have been released to the general public in Feb 2001. It's a cool picture, and would have been in the news and discussed by armatures like us all over the world. Then, we would get tired of it. When the real research was completed, it wouldn't gain the same kind of notoriety.

    Also, there would be a race among other scientists to submit analysis of the image. Undoubtedly, somebody with a lot of spare time would get a coherent analysis completed before these guys did. So, in a way, the hard work they put in to book the telescope etc. would have been wasted.

    The system is set up to allow the people that make the initial investment in getting the images some of the notoriety for the research done on them. The system therefore necessarily requires a delay before the image is released.