Re: space dust from jupiters moon io emmitting sulpher in space

Hello Peter,

In general, volcanos are not strong enough to eject things into orbit; some particles from an eruption might go several miles up, but nothing reaches escape velocity. Io is very light, though, so I'll plead "it's possible" for volcanic ejecta to escape from Io in significant quantities. However, that is not true for Jupiter. Jupiter's escape velocity is something like 60 km/s (Earth's is 11)... so in general nothing escapes accidentally.

I say "in general", though, because Jupiter/Io is a special case. Io is subject to huge magnetic fields from Jupiter, and according to JPL, 1,000 kg of material are stripped from Io every minute by these fields. The material (silicon and sulfur ions) is swept into a ring, like one of Saturn's, around Jupiter, tracing out Io's orbit. These ions can escape from the ring and fill out Jupiter's magnetosphere, carrying them quite far from the planet. The outer magnetosphere is subject to being stripped away by solar winds, and so - in spite of the trouble with escape velocities - sulpher and silicon from Io is probably being swept into space away from the sun. (Notice, however, that that doesn't bring it near the Earth/Moon system.)

I really can't think of a scenario in which Jupiter's dust and gas ends up near the Earth. Moving things from orbit to orbit in the Solar System takes a lot of energy; none of the day-to-day processes in the Solar System (not even volcanos!) are violent enough. Something called the Poynting-Robertson effect can transport larger dust particles towards the sun, but that's exactly the sort of thing that does not escape from Jupiter.

There is plenty of dust in the solar system anyway - you can read about it here, or look up in the sky and see it for yourself - it's a faint glow along the ecliptic (the path of the planets and Zodiac). Its composition should be roughly similar to that of the asteroids.

Hope this helps! And our apologies for the slow response.

-Ben Monreal