A baby Jupiter, still hot from its gestation, could have blasted its four largest moons with light so intense, it vaporized water and stripped them of volatiles.
had just formed, atmospheric escape would have occurred the same way, leaking that water vapor out into space, leaving Io more parched than anything else in the Solar System.
The effect on Europa would have been smaller than that observed for Io, leaving behind enough for a global surface ocean and its thick covering of ice. Unbelievably, that ocean is a puddle today compared to what it once had, with a large proportion of its original water lost to Jupiter's early glow. Ganymede and Callisto, the most distant Galilean moons from Jupiter, have roughly similar percentages of ice and rock; they would have remained largely unaffected by the early irradiation, and any changes between them would have been the result of differences in their subsequent evolution.
The findings, Bierson and his colleagues believe, offer a tidy and plausible explanation for the strange compositional differences between the four Galilean moons, which are thought to have formed from the same cloud of dust circling Jupiter. "The volatile inventories we see at the Galilean satellite today could be the result of one strong process, or many acting in concert,""In this work we find that heating from Jupiter could have removed any water inventory at Io in its first few million years if it was present … Overall we show that this is a process that should be considered when others struggle to explain the observed density gradient.
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