Depth 25 · Blue-white star

Vega

Vega is one of the brightest stars in the northern sky, a hot blue-white star about twice the Sun's mass. It was the first star found to be surrounded by a disk of dusty debris, and it spins so fast that it is noticeably flattened.

Fact sheet

Type

A-type main-sequence star (rapidly rotating, with a debris disk)

Distance

About 25 light-years from the Sun

Size

About 2.2 times the Sun's mass; its radius is about 2.4 times the Sun's at the poles and 2.7 times at the equator because of its fast spin

Constellation

Lyra

Position in the sky

Right ascension 18h 37m, declination +38° 47′

Seeing it from Earth

Easy to see with the naked eye from the Northern Hemisphere, where it shines high overhead on summer evenings in Lyra; it is lower but still visible from much of the Southern Hemisphere.

On the voyage

Depth 25, in the Nearby stars section of the route, between Sirius and TRAPPIST-1e

Things to know

• Vega completes a spin in only about 17 hours (0.71 days), and from Earth we see it nearly pole-on. arXiv
• In 1984 the IRAS satellite detected extra infrared light from warm dust around Vega, the first observational evidence that material orbits a star other than the Sun. NASA
• Images from Hubble and Webb released in 2024 show Vega's debris disk is about 160 billion km (100 billion miles) across and strikingly smooth, with no clear sign of large planets carving gaps in it. NASA
• Astronomers have long used Vega as a reference star for calibrating the brightness of other stars. arXiv
• Vega is roughly 40 times as luminous as the Sun but far younger, a few hundred million years old. NASA

Sources

• NASA Science – NASA's Hubble, Webb Probe Surprisingly Smooth Disk Around Vega
• NASA Science – Hubble and Webb Observations of Vega Circumstellar Disk
• Monnier et al. 2012, ApJL – Resolving Vega and the inclination controversy with CHARA/MIRC (arXiv)