Io's Volcanic Activity from Time Domain Adaptive Optics Observations: 2013–2018

Creators: de Kleer, Katherine; de Pater, Imke; Molter, Edward M.; Banks, Elizabeth; Davies, Ashley Gerard; Alvarez, Carlos; Campbell, Randy; Aycock, Joel; Pelletier, John; Stickel, Terry; Kacprzak, Glenn G.; Nielsen, Nikole M.; Stern, Daniel; Tollefson, Joshua

Abstract

We present measurements of the near-infrared brightness of Io's hot spots derived from 2 to 5 μm imaging with adaptive optics on the Keck and Gemini N telescopes. The data were obtained on 271 nights between 2013 August and the end of 2018, and include nearly 1000 detections of over 75 unique hot spots. The 100 observations obtained between 2013 and 2015 have been previously published in de Kleer & de Pater the observations since the start of 2016 are presented here for the first time, and the analysis is updated to include the full five-year data set. These data provide insight into the global properties of Io's volcanism. Several new hot spots and bright eruptions have been detected, and the preference for bright eruptions to occur on Io's trailing hemisphere noted in the 2013–2015 data is strengthened by the larger data set and remains unexplained. The program overlapped in time with Sprint-A/EXCEED and Juno observations of the Jovian system, and correlations with transient phenomena seen in other components of the system have the potential to inform our understanding of the impact of Io's volcanism on Jupiter and its neutral/plasma environment.

Additional Information

© 2019 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2019 January 26; revised 2019 May 13; accepted 2019 May 14; published 2019 June 21. K.d.K. is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation through a 51 Pegasi b postdoctoral fellowship, and this research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation grant AST-1313485 to UC Berkeley and a NASA Keck PI Data Award, administered by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. We are grateful to Roy and Frances Simperman for their support of the Keck Visiting Scholars program, which enabled K.d.K., E.M., and C.A. to develop the Keck twilight program through which some of the data presented here were obtained. We thank G. Puniwai for acquiring several of the Keck observations. We thank P. Capak, J. Cohen, N. Hernitschek, D. Masters, and S.A. Stanford of the the Complete Calibration of the Color-Redshift Relation (C3R2; Masters et al. 2017) NASA Keck Key Strategic Mission Support survey team for providing twilight observations on the nights of UT 2017 December 11–13. The work of D.S. and A.G.D. was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. Much of the data presented herein were obtained at the Gemini Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), National Research Council (Canada), CONICYT (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva (Argentina), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação (Brazil), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea). Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Some of the data was obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory from telescope time allocated to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through the agency's scientific partnership with the California Institute of Technology and the University of California. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.

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