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“Reading the Heat: Juno Takes Io’s Temperature from the Inside”

Io is a place of superlatives. More than four hundred active volcanoes. Lava lakes. Plumes that climb hundreds of kilometres above the surface. Its garish yellows and sulphur reds come from being resurfaced, endlessly, by its own eruptions. All of that fury is driven by tidal heating:

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Whatever You Call It, Tonight Is Pluto’s Night

There is a faint dot in the constellation Capricornus tonight that you almost certainly cannot see, and it is the most argued-about object in the Solar System. Pluto reaches opposition on 27 July — sitting directly opposite the Sun in our sky, rising at sunset, riding highest around midnight, and sitting about as close to Earth as it ever gets, a little under 35 astronomical units away. That makes tonight its brightest of the year.

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