Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 21, 2016

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REAL LIFE NEWS: JUPITER MOON LOSES ITS ATMOSPHERE EVERY DAY

by Hazed

Jupiter’s moon Io has an atmosphere. Wait – no it doesn’t. Oh yes – there it is again. In fact, its atmosphere vanishes and then reappears every day.

What happens is that as the moon passes behind Jupiter, it cools right down. Each Ionian day (about 1.7 Earth days) it spends around 2 hours in the gas giant’s shadow. Its temperature drops from -235 degrees F, to -270 degrees F. This rapid cooling causes its atmosphere (made up mostly of sulphur dioxide) to collapse.

Research funded by NASA has just been published, and it shows that during those two hours of eclipse, “most of the sulphur dioxide gas settles as frost on the moon’s surface. The atmosphere redevelops as the surface warms once the moon returns to full sunlight.”

The sulphur comes from the moon’s volcanoes, which create lava fields of basalt, and send plumes of SO2 nearly 500km into space. The volcanoes are caused by the gravity field of Jupiter and its other moons, making Io the most volcanically-active object in the Solar System.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/03/io_loses_its_atmosphere_when_jupiter_blocks_the_sun/

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