20 Euro Austria 2021 - Milky Way

Description:

The ancient Greeks associated the milky band of light we see when we look up into the clear night sky with Heracles, who, as a baby, sucked so hard at the breast of the goddess Hera that she withdrew it from her mouth, spilling her milk across the sky. The interpretation became more scientific in 1610 when, using a telescope, Galileo Galilei discovered that the Milky Way is in fact made up of countless individual stars. By this time, Nicolaus Copernicus had already debunked the long-held belief that the earth, rather than the sun, was the center of the universe, but Galileo was also to show that the sun was just one of many stars in the Milky Way. . The worldview was shaken again in 1920 when Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies. Although this made the earth increasingly insignificant, the smaller the planet, the greater our knowledge of outer space became, and the more we began to understand our physical place in the cosmos.

The combination of the convex and concave surfaces on the obverse of the coin produces an S-shaped silver surface on which the Milky Way is depicted. The angular dimensions of the galactic coordinate system show the sun's position relative to the rest of our galaxy. The position of the Orion arm, in which our solar system is located, is also marked. The same applies to the positions of the astronomical phenomena Cygnus X-1 and Crab Pulsar, which play a special role on the other two coins in the series. The reverse of the coin features the same image of the Milky Way spiral, but in a spectacular form printed in color.

Composition: Silver 925/1000

Diameter: 34 mm

Weight: 22.42 g

Production run: 30,000 pieces