A new analysis of data from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft reveals that beneath the surface of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io is an “ocean” of molten or partially molten magma. The magma ocean layer appears to be more than 30 miles thick, making up at least 10 percent of the moon’s mantle by volume. The blistering temperature of the magma ocean probably exceeds 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit (1,200 degrees Celsius). Hotcha!

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft discovered Io’s volcanoes in 1979 and they are the only known active magma volcanoes in the solar system other than those on Earth. The energy for the volcanic activity comes from the squeezing and stretching of the moon by Jupiter’s gravity as Io orbits the immense planet, the largest in the solar system.

Even though the magnetic-field data was taken from Galileo fly-bys of Io in October 1999 and February 2000, it took awhile to detect this magma layer. ScienceInsider reports that

high-flying volcanic debris frustrated space physicists’ attempts to use Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field as a probe of Io’s interior.

The current analysis, over ten years in the making, was published in this week’s edition of Science.

From a hot ocean to hot Jupiters…  Hot Jupiters describe large gaseous exoplanets that orbit very close to their parent star. Some of these hot Jupiters are just plain crazy weird, say scientists, because they orbit their star in the opposite direction.

“That’s really weird, and it’s even weirder because the planet is so close to the star,” said Frederic A. Rasio, a theoretical astrophysicist at Northwestern University. “How can one be spinning one way and the other orbiting exactly the other way? It’s crazy. It so obviously violates our most basic picture of planet and star formation.”

When scientists find something weird and crazy, they investigate. And that’s just what Rasio and his colleagues did. Using large-scale computer simulations, they are the first to model how a hot Jupiter’s orbit can flip and go in the direction opposite to the star’s spin. Gravitational perturbations by a much more distant planet result in the hot Jupiter having both a “wrong way” and a very close orbit, according to their research, published this week in Nature.

In other exoplanet news… The Kepler mission’s primary goal is to find Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars, and now you can help find them, too! UC Berkeley astronomers aimed a radio telescope in the direction of Kepler’s most Earth-like candidates last weekend. Once they acquire data on a total of 86 Earth-like planets, they’ll initiate a coarse analysis and then, in about two months, ask an estimated 1 million SETI@home users to conduct a more detailed analysis on their home computers. Join SETI@home or learn more information about the project here.

Io image: NASA/JPL/University of Michigan/UCLA

This image was left out of the lot—but it is one of the coolest pictures of the sun I’ve ever seen.

Earth-sized exoplanets are plentiful, read the headlines yesterday. UC Berkeley researchers, publishing in the journal Science, report ^“that 23% of stars harbor a close-in Earth-mass planets (ranging from 0.5 to 2.0 Earth masses).” As the 80beats blog in Discover reports, “As is always the difficulty with planet hunting, ‘Earth-size’ is not ‘Earth-like.’” Most of these are too close to their parent star—hot, hot—to be inhabitable. Nature’s The Great Beyond has a great, concise blog post about the news, “There’s no place like home?”—check it out for more info.

Another science headline that caught our eye this week was from the BBC, “Sea urchins tolerate acid water.”

Sea urchins are likely to be able to adapt to increasingly acidic oceans resulting from climate change, according to new research.

Are they the cockroaches of the sea? We asked our sea urchin scientist (actually, Curator and Department Chair of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology here at the Academy), Rich Mooi, about the news article. He was unable to find the actual research online, and found many holes in the BBC’s piece:

I cannot see how the idea that these urchins will “adapt” to dropping pH or “tolerate acid water” can be reconciled with the finding that the larvae deposit less calcium carbonate under lower pH conditions.  Successful metamorphosis and subsequent development of the skeleton in the young adult is heavily dependent on the amount of calcium carbonate that the larvae start out with…

The article quotes the researchers on the subject of carbon sinks and carbon budgets, suggesting that “echinoderms currently contribute more than 5% to the total removal of inorganic carbon from the surface ocean to the deep sea.”  This is an overestimate of rather large proportions….

Overall, this study only used the larvae of a single, shallow-water species of common urchin.  The results are interesting as far as that goes, but the broader implications of the work need so much more investigation that the article seems more sensational than is justified.

So don’t believe everything you read…

What did you find unbelievable in science news this week? Let us know.