John R. Spencer

Southwest Research Institute, 1050 Walnut Street, Boulder, CO 80302, USA.

Second-closest to Jupiter (after Io) of the four large Galilean satellites, icy Europa is one of the strangest objects in the solar system (1). On page 171 of this issue, Roth et al. (2) present strong evidence for ongoing eruptions of plumes of water vapor from Europa’s surface. This is a potentially major discovery, making Europa only the fourth object in the solar system known to exhibit ongoing internally powered geological activity, after Earth, Europa’s volcanic neighbor moon Io, and Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus.

Reference
Spencer JR (2014) Glimpsing Eruptions on Europa. Science 343:148-149.
[doi:10.1126/science.1248879]
Reprinted with permission from AAAS

Link to Article