NEWSNOTES

Callistos Inner Secrets

Ever since Voyagers 1 and 2 returned snapshots of the
Jovian system in 1979 astronomers have sometimes thought of
Callisto as the boring Galilean satellite. The big moons icy,
eons-old surface bears thousands of impact scars, but it lacks
the dynamic geologic activity so prevalent on neighboring
Ganymede, Europa, and Io. Ongoing study by the Galileo orbiter confirms this basic impression.
However, Galileo has found signs that cryogenic quiescence
may not extend to Callistos core. A carefully tracked flyby last
September showed that Callistos gravity field cannot result
from a homogeneous mixture of rock and ice. As John D. Anderson (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and his team explain in
June 5ths Science, Callisto must be partially differentiated,
with its exterior dominated by water ice and its deep interior
largely rock and metal.
An even greater surprise is the finding that Callisto is not
magnetically inert. Galileo measurements imply that something roughly 100 kilometers below the surface is interacting
strongly with the field in Jupiters magnetosphere, and that
something is most likely a salt-laced, global ocean at least 10
km deep. At a meeting of geophysicists in May, magnetometer
team leader Margaret G. Kivelson (University of California,
Los Angeles) explained how Callistos magnetic signature
mimics that observed at Europa, where evidence continues to
mount for a subsurface ocean (S&T: December 1997, page 50).
Its not at all what project scientists expected from an ice
world that should have frozen solid long ago. In fact, last year
the magnetometer team tentatively concluded (based on earlier
flybys) that Callisto did not have any kind of internal magnetic
field, induced or otherwise. Kivelson says she is as perplexed as
anyone, but the results fit so nicely with no adjustments that
her team is now pushing the ocean idea.

Har, the double-ring impact basin seen here, has an unusual raised
mound on its floor. Although its origin is unclear, the mound could
have been caused by ice-rich material pushing up from Callistos interior. The younger, unrelated crater on Hars rim at left is 40 kilometers
wide. Galileo image courtesy NASA and Arizona State University.

The Callisto revelation has handed theorists a dual challenge: how part of the 4,800-km-wide moons interior has remained liquid for 41/2 billion years, and how a global, subsurface ocean could be hidden from the surface, where
geologists find scant evidence for subterranean activity. The
gravity data cant distinguish solid ice from liquid water, only
that the moons outer shell has the density of H2O. So Kivelson
hopes to refine the magnetometers discovery when Galileo
again skims by Callisto on May 5th next year.

Keeping Tabs on a Textbook Dwarf

DAVID GOLIMOWSKI

In late 1995, Tadashi Nakajima (then

at Caltech) and his colleagues announced
that the decades-long search for brown
dwarfs had hit the jackpot (S&T: April
1996, page 24). Since then, a team led by

20

codiscoverer David Golimowski (Johns

Hopkins University) has been keeping a
close eye on Gliese 229B, as the first confirmed brown dwarf is known. As reported in the Astronomical Journal for June,
the astronomers observed the pair on
three occasions from November 1995 to
November 1996, using the Wide Field
and Planetary Camera 2 on the Hubble
Space Telescope. This has confirmed that
the brown dwarf shares the across-thesky (proper) motion of Gliese 229A, its
8th-magnitude red-dwarf companion.
Whats more, the images are just beginning to reveal Gliese 229Bs orbital
motion around its larger companion.
Presuming the brown dwarf s mass to be
about 47 times that of Jupiter, Golimow-

ski and his colleagues have determined

that it orbits its parent star in a period
of 236 years or more with a semimajor
axis of at least 32 astronomical units.
The team has also estimated the faint
objects orbital eccentricity to be 0.25 or
higher. This suggests that Gliese 229B
may have formed as a binary companion
to the red dwarf, rather than as a planet.
(Thats because planets inherit circular
orbits as they grow within disks controlled by centripetal forces, while binaries generally form with eccentric orbits
around a common center of mass.) The
astronomers acknowledge, however, that
years of additional observation will be
needed to pin down the brown dwarf s
true mass and origin.

This 9-arcsecond-wide near-infrared image, taken on November 17, 1995, with the Hubble
Space Telescope, shows Gliese 229A in the upper-right corner and its famed companion intrinsically the faintest object outside the solar system ever imaged at visual wavelengths in
the lower left. North is up with east to the left.
October 1998 Sky & Telescope

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