Scientists with NASA’s Juno mission have discovered a volcanic hot spot in the southern hemisphere of Jupiter’s moon Io…larger than Earth’s Lake Superior, it belches out eruptions six times the total energy of all the world’s power plants…the new hot spot’s radiance measured well above 80 trillion watts.
—JPL/NASA News Release, January 28, 2025
Prediction is the ultimate test, and indeed, the Jovian moon Io has consistently provided one of the clearest successes for the EU Model. In the mid 1990s, prior to NASA’s Galileo mission, Wal Thornhill proposed that Io’s volcanic plumes are in fact forms of electrical discharge; that the so-called volcanic vents would be much hotter than lava; that plumes are the jets of cathode arcs.
This electrical discharge does not explode from a volcanic vent, but moves around and erodes the periphery of dark areas, which planetary geologists call lava lakes—which are merely the solid surface of Io etched electrically by cathode arcs.
Independent researcher Stuart Talbott wonders that with the 21st century almost one-quarter complete, why does the causative role of electric currents in the cosmos remain verboten in the space sciences?
