The most volcanic place in the solar system captured in high resolution for the first time

Fascinating new photos shared by NASA show an unprecedented look at the most volcanic place in our solar system.

The images are the first time we’ve been able to see this distant volcanic land in high resolution. They were captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which has a highly sensitive camera called the Stellar Reference Unit. It made several close flybys past Jupiter’s volcanic moon, Io.

They happened in late 2023 and early 2024 and the images show hot lava. The space agency said: "During the #JunoMission's close flybys of Io, its instruments detected recent changes on the surface, and even the glow of active lava.”

Juno was only 932 miles (1,500 kilometres) above Io when it took the images. They’re the highest-resolution images the spacecraft has ever captured of Jupiter's third largest moon and the most volcanically active world in the solar system.

One black-and-white image shows the Zal Montes-Patera complex at the centre of the image, and the western portion of the Tonatiuh eruptive centre at the left edge of the left image and top edge of the right image.

The high-res images show the Zal Montes-Patera complex on Io.NASA / Caltech-JPL / SwRI / LPI/USRA

The image shows fresh new lava flows at Zal Patera. A patera is a broad, shallow bowl-shaped feature on the surface of a planet. The image shows “an unprecedented elongated, curved emission feature” which is “suspected to be an active lava channel".

Io is covered in hundreds of erupting volcanoes because of a “tug-of-war” between Jupiter's “powerful” gravity and smaller but “precisely timed” pulls from two moons that are nearby but orbit farther from Jupiter – Europa and Ganymede, NASA explained.

Jupiter itself has also made headlines recently after two massive thunderstorms that are both wider than Earth were spotted across the planet, and some experts believe they could end up changing the planet’s appearance.

The planet is a gas giant with a unique appearance of stripes known as bands and as the largest planet in our solar system, it often gets a lot of attention.

Recently, planetary scientists warned that the red spot we see today may not actually be the same red spot that was first discovered 350 years ago.

In 1665, Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini spotted the "Permanent Spot" on Jupiter but then for centuries astronomers seemingly lost track of it.

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