Occultation Mapping of Io’s Surface in the Near-infrared. I. Inferring Static Maps

Abstract

Abstract With hundreds of active volcanoes varying in intensity on different timescales, Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Io has been observed from Earth using high-cadence near-infrared photometry during occultations by Jupiter and other Galilean moons since the 1980s. These observations encode a wealth of information about the volcanic features on its surface. We built a generative model for the observed occultation light curves using the code starry, which enables fast, analytic, and differentiable computation of occultation light curves in emitted and reflected light. Using this model, we are able to recover surface thermal emission maps of Io containing known volcanic hot spots without having to make assumptions about the locations, shapes, or number of hot spots. Our model is also directly applicable to the problem of mapping the surfaces of stars and exoplanets.