Gish Bar Patera is a patera, or a complex crater with scalloped edges, on

Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but ...

's moon Io. It is 106.3 by 115.0 kilometers and 9,600 km² in area. It is located at . It is named after the

Babylonia Babylonia (; Akkadian: , ''māt Akkadī'') was an ancient Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in the city of Babylon in central-southern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq and parts of Syria). It emerged as an Amorite-ruled state c. ...

n sun god Gish Bar. Its name was approved by the

International Astronomical Union The International Astronomical Union (IAU; french: link=yes, Union astronomique internationale, UAI) is a nongovernmental organisation with the objective of advancing astronomy in all aspects, including promoting astronomical research, outreac ...

in 1997. It is located at the southern base of Gish Bar Mons, an 11-kilometer-high mountain. To the northeast is Skythia Mons, and to the east is Monan Mons, at the north and south ends of which are Monan Patera and Ah Peku Patera. The NASA spacecraft ''

Galileo Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He was ...

'' has detected volcanic activity in Gish Bar Patera's past, particularly in 1996, and a new eruption was detected by ''Galileos near-infrared mapping spectrometer in August 2001. The western section of the patera is mostly green, with a few bright spots, whereas the eastern section is mostly orange. The active northwestern region of Gish Bar Patera has a mottled floor from several eruptions. The patera's flows may be composed of

silicate In chemistry, a silicate is any member of a family of polyatomic anions consisting of silicon and oxygen, usually with the general formula , where . The family includes orthosilicate (), metasilicate (), and pyrosilicate (, ). The name is al ...

References

{{Io Volcanoes of Io (moon) Active volcanoes