Photo Composite of Suspected Water Plumes on Europa

This composite image shows suspected plumes of water vapor erupting at the 7 o'clock position off the limb of Jupiter's moon Europa. The plumes, photographed by NASA's Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, were seen in silhouette as the moon passed in front of Jupiter. Hubble's ultraviolet sensitivity allowed for the features, rising over 100 miles above Europa's icy surface, to be discerned. The water is believed to come from a subsurface ocean on Europa. The Hubble data were taken on January 26, 2014. The image of Europa, superimposed on the Hubble data, is assembled from data from the Galileo and Voyager missions.

About the colours

This image was made by HST's STIS MAMA instrument with the F25SRF2 filter (150nm UV). Color was added to the grayscale image using a blue color mapping. A separate grayscale image of Europa, produced using data from the NASA Galileo and Voyager missions, was superimposed to scale. Blue: F25SRF2

About the data

Data were provided by HST proposals 13438 , 13620 , and 13829 : W. Sparks (STScI), S. Deustua (STScI), K. Hand (JPL), M. McGrath (SETI Institute), and E. Bergeron and M. Cracraft (STScI).