Silver Niobium Coin
Cosmology

Hot on the heals of our trailblazing 2014 coin, featuring two shades of niobium on both sides, comes our stunning 2015 offering, Cosmology. As ever, our innovative Silver Niobium series explores fittingly high-tech themes. This time, Cosmology brilliantly deploys its contrasting blue and yellow niobium hues to bring outer space just a little bit closer to home.

On its obverse, Cosmology features an illustration of the universe in its niobium core, complete with stars, the planet Saturn and its rings, and the Rosetta space probe, the first ever spacecraft to orbit a comet. On the coin’s reverse, the planets in orbit encircle the European Extremely Large Telescope, which is currently under construction by the European Southern Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile and is due for completion in 2022. The telescope will enable us to look deeper than ever into the solar system, the galaxy and the universe, concepts illustrated on the coin’s outer silver rings. It may not answer the question: Are we alone in the universe? But it will certainly make a major contribution to the search for extra-terrestrial life.