MILKY WAY Shades of Space 1 Oz Silver Coin 5$ Samoa 2017

Milky Way
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. The descriptive "milky" is derived from the appearance from Earth of the galaxy – a band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The term "Milky Way" is a translation of the Latin via lactea. From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from within. Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610. Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe. Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies. 

The reverse of the coin presents a spectacular image of the Milky Way, as a combination of X-Rays and infrared emissions, omitting some of the stars to let the silver surface shine through the applied colour.