A workforce of scientists affiliated with a number of establishments within the U.S. has examined a concept created to elucidate the quantity of oxygen within the ambiance of Callisto, considered one of Jupiter’s moons, and has discovered that it falls brief. Of their paper printed in Journal of Geophysical Analysis: Planets, the group describes how they examined the speculation and different potential avenues of analysis.
Callisto is second in dimension to Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. It’s also essentially the most closely cratered. Callisto has grow to be the article of extra scrutiny lately because of the unexplained great amount of oxygen in its ambiance.
Prior analysis has recommended that Callisto has a thick crust underneath which can lie an ocean, however its composition continues to be not clear—it is perhaps crust with some ice, or principally ice. It has additionally been recognized for a while that Callisto’s ambiance has a excessive proportion of oxygen. What has remained a thriller is how that oxygen received there, and why it persists. One major concept to elucidate its presence is that Jupiter’s highly effective magnetosphere could also be knocking unfastened molecules of hydrogen, water and oxygen from the ice on Callisto’s floor. On this new effort, the researchers examined that theory.
The work concerned simulating the thermal and energetic elements of Jupiter’s magnetosphere—particularly its plasma—and estimating the power that will make it to Callisto’s ambiance and floor. Subsequent, they calculated the quantity of oxygen that that must be launched based mostly on that quantity of publicity. They then in contrast the quantity of oxygen that must be in Callisto’s ambiance (based mostly on their calculations) with the quantity that’s really there and located an enormous discrepancy. There was way more oxygen within the atmosphere than might be defined by the affect of Jupiter’s magnetosphere—by two or three orders of magnitude.
That leaves the origin of the oxygen an entire thriller. The analysis workforce means that extra is perhaps discovered from upcoming missions such because the ESA’s JUICE and NASAs Europa Clipper.
Extra info:
Shane R. Carberry Mogan et al, Callisto’s Ambiance: The Oxygen Enigma, Journal of Geophysical Analysis: Planets (2023). DOI: 10.1029/2023JE007894
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Jupiter’s magnetosphere knocking molecules from ice on floor of Callisto doesn’t clarify quantity of atmospheric oxygen (2023, September 18)
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