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The Trivial News
Harry Potter and the Moons of Jupiter
. . .Blistering-hot
volcanoes that belch snow. Moons bigger than planets. Icy worlds with
vast underground oceans. All of these things can be found in the latest
Harry Potter novel. And according to NASA space probes, they're all
real.
One night at Hogwarts when Harry, Ron and Hermione were doing their
homework: "a long and difficult essay about Jupiter's moons, " Harry and
Ron didn't have their facts straight.
"Harry, you must have misheard Professor Sinistra, " says Hermione on
page 300 of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. "Europa's
covered in ice, not mice!"
Correct. Jupiter's moon Europa is way too cold for mice: 260° F
below zero. Spacecraft have taken pictures of Europa's icy surface, and
it looks totally lifeless.
Underground, however, might be a different matter. Some scientists
think theice on Europa hides the biggest ocean in the solar
system--bigger than thePacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans combined.
Here on Earth water and lifeseem to go together. Could there be life in
the waters of Europa? Microbes?Alien fish? Swimming mice? No one
knows--not even Hermione.
"And it's Io that's got the volcanoes, " she says on page 295,
correcting Ron's essay.
Right again. Io is even weirder than Europa. Some people say Io,
dotted withvolcanoes, looks like a pepperoni pizza, and that's about
right. Io has more pepperoni-colored volcanoes than Ron Weasley has
freckles. At any given moment, dozens of them might be active, spewing
the hottest lava in the solar system. The plumes rise 300 miles into
space where it's so cold that volcanic ash freezes before it falls back
to the ground--sulfurous snow. NASA's Galileo spacecraft has actually
flown through some of these plumes and survived.
"Jupiter's biggest moon is Ganymede, not Callisto, " Hermione adds,
pointing over Ron's shoulder at another mistake.
Indeed, Ganymede is the largest moon in the whole solar system. It's
slightly wider than the planet Mercury and more than three-quarters the
size of the planet Mars. If it orbited the sun instead of Jupiter,
Ganymede would surely be considered a planet. Heavily-cratered Callisto
is only a little smaller than Ganymede and, like Europa, might be hiding
a subterranean ocean.
These four wonderful moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are real.
They were discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610 when he looked at
Jupiter through one of the first primitive telescopes. Galileo was
amazed by the four little stars he saw near the giant planet, and even
more amazed when they moved from night to night, orbiting Jupiter.
Astronomers now call them the Galilean satellites.
Almost everything known about the Galilean satellites -- other than
their number, four, and the basic shapes and sizes of their orbits --
comes from NASA spacecraft, especially the two Voyagers, which flew by
Jupiter in 1979, and the Galileo space probe orbiting Jupiter now.
Yes, It's good to know that these missions have been closely followed at
Hogwarts!
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