Hot Times on Jupiter's Moon Io

The innermost moon of Jupiter is Io. Since it is a satellite of Jupiter, its distance from the sun varies, so we'll settle for 790,000,000 kilometers (about 490,883,242 miles). It is 3,636 km in diameter (1,942 miles). Compare that diameter to Earth's 12,742 km (7,918 miles) diameter. Io is a very cold place, what with being so far from the sun and all — except for the places with volcanoes, and it has lots of them.

"Prometheus Plume" on Io, NASA / JPL

The volcanic activity on pizza — I mean, Io — breaks all the cosmology rules. It should not be shooting hot plumes huge distances, the volcanic activity is hotter than a six gun in a speed-shooting competition (and hotter than anything on Earth), it keeps on erupting, and more. It should be cold, dead and quiet. Instead, it's another item that refutes "deep time" cosmology, and is evidence of a young solar system.

A moon of Jupiter slightly bigger than our moon shocked scientists in 1979 when Voyager cameras detected a volcanic plume in action. In the 34 years since, Io has never had a quiet day. It’s the most volcanically active body in the solar system—100 times more active than the earth. Io is a major mystery for believers in billions of years, but not for those who accept the biblical time frame.

This is a world that, if it were really old, should be freezing—not only on the outside, because of being far away from the sun, but on the inside, too. Smaller bodies cool down much more quickly than big ones, and Io is quite tiny on a solar system scale. So even taking radioactive decay into account, Io’s interior should have become cold a long time ago. Yet it is incredibly active, and keeps spewing out the hottest lava anywhere.

 You can finish reading by clicking on the hot link, "The violent volcanoes of Io".