09/02/2026
Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, roughly 400 active volcanoes with plumes hundreds of kilometres high, and its heat output is dominated by tidal heating rather than radioactive decay.
The reason is geometry. Io, Europa and Ganymede are locked in a 1:2:4 Laplace resonance: for every orbit Ganymede completes, Europa does two and Io does four. Those repeated gravitational nudges prevent Io's orbit from becoming perfectly circular.
An eccentric orbit means Io's distance from Jupiter, and so the tidal deformation Jupiter causes, keeps changing. The moon is flexed, over and over, and that flexing dissipates energy as heat until the interior melts.
A moon kept molten by its neighbours' timing.
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