Niue 1 Dollar Silver Coin 2015 The Most Beautiful Galaxies - Active Galaxy NGC 4945
The Most Beautiful Galaxies series was designed in collaboration with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) – the leading intergovernmental astronomy organization in Europe. The first coin in series is dedicated to the Spiral Galaxy NGC 1232. It is about 100 million light years away in the Eridanus constellation. The coin comes in two versions: pure silver .999 and 24-carat gold-plated brass.
The traditional obverse of the coin by Niue bears the portrait of Her Majesty Elizabeth II surrounded by the following inscriptions: the Queen’s name, the face value of the coin, its issuing year and country.
The reverse features an image of God taken from the “Ancient of Days” by W. Blake, drawing a circle around a selected galaxy with a compass. The colored image of a galaxy was taken in 1998 with one of the first Very Large Telescopes (VLT) located in the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The image was perfectly imprinted in high resolution technology. The background image represents a monochord – an ancient one-string musical instrument that symbolizes deep exploration of music and cosmology.
Face value: 1 Dollar.
Metal: Silver.
Diameter: 38,61 mm.
Weight: 17,5 g.
Quality: Proof.
Mintage: 1850 pcs.
Certificate: Certificate of Authenticity.
Presentation Packaging.
K-band image obtained with NACO and the LGS of the active galaxy NGC 4945. The colour-code corresponds to intensity. Lurking in the very heart of this spiral galaxy is a supermassive black hole that is obscured at optical and infrared wavelengths, but which is one of the brightest in the local universe when observed in hard X-rays. The new LGS observations with NACO resolved the continuum in the central thousand light-years into a multitude of individual stars. The exquisite detail meant that it was possible to measure the magnitudes of the brightest of these stars. It suggests that they are red supergiant stars, which would have been born about 10 million years ago. Closer to the nucleus, the stars group into clusters, and become ever more closely packed. The huge luminosity of the central few clusters suggests that there are 10 to 100 such supergiant stars in each of these, packed into regions just a few parsecs across.
The Most Beautiful Galaxies series
The entire collection will comprise:The Tinker Bell Triplet, The Topsy-Turvy Galaxy NGC 1313, Messier 100 NGC 4321,
The Active Galaxy NGC 4945, The Centre of the Active Galaxy NGC 1097, Centaurus A, Antenna Galaxies, The Sombrero Galaxy, Spiral Galaxy NGC 1232.