Space Lava Drives Jupiter’s Powerful Aurora Lights
- Jupiter’s aurora lights, the most powerful in the solar system, are partly driven by moon volcanoes.
- Volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon Io send electrically charged lava plasma toward the planet’s poles.
- The Hubble Space Telescope helped researchers track electric currents driving the aurora.
Jupiter’s auroras — the lights that dance around its poles — are the most distinct in our solar system and over a thousand times brighter than Earth’s aurora. Now, a new study confirms that these otherworldly polar lights come from a unique source: space lava.
Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active world in the solar system. Its more than 400 active volcanoes regularly shoot lava dozens of miles high, where it falls into Jupiter’s orbit and becomes plasma — “a soup of electrically charged material,” astronomer James O’Donoghue told Insider.