Dust escape from Io

Abstract

The Dust ballerina skirt is a set of well defined streams composed of nanometric sized dust particles that escape from the Jovian system and may be accelerated up to ≥200 km/s. The source of this dust is Jupiter's moon Io, the most volcanically active body in the Solar system. The escape of dust grains from Jupiter requires first the escape of these grains from Io. This work is basically devoted to explain this escape given that the driving of dust particles to great heights and later injection into the ionosphere of Io may give the particles an equilibrium potential that allow the magnetic field to accelerate them away from Io. The grain sizes obtained through this study match very well to the values required for the particles to escape from the Jovian system.