Scientists to Jupiter’s moon Io: Your volcanoes are in the wrong place.
“The unexpected eastward offset of the volcano locations is a clue that something is missing in our understanding of Io,” says Hamilton. “In a way, that’s our most important result. Our understanding of tidal heat production and its relationship to surface volcanism is incomplete. The interpretation for why we have the offset and other statistical patterns we observed is open, but I think we’ve enabled a lot of new questions, which is good.”
I love this talk about Io, mostly because I have a short story I’ve been trying to write for years, a few of you may remember the first few versions of “Squatter’s Rights,” which has since been completely dumped multiple times but still retains one common “fact” – that Io is in fact an artificial body. The article has nothing to do with this, but the coincidence of Io in the news (of all the moons in the local system) compelled me to share. The most recent draft actually involves a xenogeologist exploring Io when she discovers the real reason why the little moon generates an S-band radio beacon.