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One of the biggest volcanic eruptions ever seen in the solar system has been spotted on Jupiter's active moon Io.

The huge eruption took place in August 2013 but has now been revealed in a series of stunning images taken by the Gemini Observatory.

And the massive outpourings of magma, far exceeding the temperature of anything produced in volcanoes on Earth today, could help provide information into the early history of planets like ours.

This image of Io was taken in the near-infrared with adaptive optics at the Gemini North telescope on 29 August 2013. In addition to the extremely bright eruption on the upper right limb of the satellite, the lava lake Loki is visible in the middle of Io's disk, as well as a fading eruption that was detected earlier in the month at its base

This particular eruption was the 'grand finale' of a series of eruptions that took place over a number of weeks.

The first two massive eruptions were spotted on 15 August 2013 by Dr Imke de Pater of University of California, Berkeley (UCB) in Io's southern hemisphere.

This was done using the near-infrared camera (NIRC2) on the Keck II telescope, one of two 10-meter (33 feet) telescopes operated by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii

The brightest of the first two at a caldera - an opening that can accompany a volcano - named Rarog Patera was calculated to have produced a lava flow 50 square miles (130 square kilometres) in area and 30 feet (10 metres) thick.

The other eruption, close to another caldera called Heno Patera, produced flows covering 120 square miles (310 square kilometers).

A third and even brighter eruption - one of the brightest ever seen on Io - was then found on 29 August using both the Near-Infrared Imager with adaptive optics on the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea, and the SpeX near-infrared spectrometer on Nasa's nearby Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF).

The researchers said this was more than 10,000 times more powerful than the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland.

They concluded that the energy emitted was about 20 Terawatts and expelled many cubic kilometers of lava.

These images of Io were at the Gemini North telescope and track the evolution of the eruption as it decreased in intensity over 12 days. Due to Io's rapid rotation, a different area of the surface is viewed on each night; the outburst is visible with diminishing brightness on 29 and 30 August and 1, 3 and 10 September

Graduate student and researcher Katherine de Kleer showed that the eruption temperature was probably much higher than comparable ones on Earth today.

She said it was 'indicative of a composition of the magma that on Earth only occurred in our planet's formative years.'

Dr de Pater, meanwhile, explains how they usually expect one huge outburst form Io every one or two years, but they're not normally this bright.

'Here we had three extremely bright outbursts, which suggest that if we looked more frequently we might see many more of them on Io,' he explained.

And his colleague and co-author Ashley Davies of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said the recent eruptions match past events that spewed tens of cubic miles of lava over hundreds of square miles in a short period of time.

'These new events are in a relatively rare class of eruptions on Io because of their size and astonishingly high thermal emission,' Davies said. 

'The amount of energy being emitted by these eruptions implies lava fountains gushing out of fissures at a very large volume per second, forming lava flows that quickly spread over the surface of Io.'

All three events, including the largest, most powerful eruption of the trio on 29 August 2013, were likely characterized by 'curtains of fire' as lava blasted out of fissures perhaps several miles long.

'We are using Io as a volcanic laboratory, where we can look back into the past of the terrestrial planets to get a better understanding of how these large eruptions took place, and how fast and how long they lasted,' Davies said.

Io, the innermost of Jupiter's four large 'Galilean' moons, is about 2,300 miles across (3,630 kilometers). Aside from Earth, it is the only known place in the solar system with volcanoes erupting extremely hot lava like that on our planet. In this image an 86-mile (138 km) high plume was spotted by the Galileo spacecraft in 1997

The third and brightest eruption - one of the brightest ever seen on Io - was found on 29 August using both the Near-Infrared Imager with adaptive optics on the Gemini North telescope (shown) on Mauna Kea, and the SpeX near-infrared spectrometer on Nasa's nearby Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF)