Silver Twenty Grams 2011 Muonionalusta Meteorite, Coin from Cook Islands - detailed information

The Cook Islands, a sovereign state in free association with New Zealand, uses two official legal tender currencies. The New Zealand Dollar circulates in parallel with the local Cook Islands Dollar; at the same time, the government also authorises many legal tender coins in the Cook Islands Dollar currency for collector's purposes.

Collector coins are dedicated to historical or general popular culture themes not related to the country itself. Many of them are in bullion sizes based on the troy ounce, but some are "metric", like twenty grams (20g) of silver.

This coin featuring the Muonionalusta Meteorite is part of the Meteorite Impacts collection which is issued in a number of different countries; all coins in it have an embedded original piece of the specific meteorite.

The Muonionalusta meteorite is classified as fine octahedrite, type IVA (Of) which impacted in northern Scandinavia, west of the border between Sweden and Finland, about one million years BCE.

The first fragment of the Muonionalusta meteorite was found in 1906 near the village of Kitkiöjärvi. Around forty pieces are known today, some being quite large. Other fragments have been found in a 25-by-15-kilometre area in the Pajala district of Norrbotten County, approximately 140 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle.

The meteorite was first described in 1910 by Professor A. G. Högbom, who named it after the nearby place Muonionalusta on the Muonio River. The Muonionalusta meteorite, probably the oldest known meteorite (4.5653 ± 0.0001 billion years), marks the first occurrence of stishovite in an iron meteorite.