25 Facts About Vega

Vega is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Lyra.

Vega has been extensively studied by astronomers, leading it to be termed "arguably the next most important star in the sky after the Sun".

Vega was the first star other than the Sun to have its image and spectrum photographed.

Vega has functioned as the baseline for calibrating the photometric brightness scale and was one of the stars used to define the zero point for the UBV photometric system.

Vega is only about a tenth of the age of the Sun, but since it is 2.

Related searches

Vega is a variable star that varies slightly in brightness.

From Earth, Vega is observed from the direction of one of these poles.

At latitudes to the north of 51° N, Vega remains continuously above the horizon as a circumpolar star.

Vega is the brightest of the successive northern pole stars.

On 17 July 1850, Vega became the first star to be photographed, when it was imaged by William Bond and John Adams Whipple at the Harvard College Observatory, with a daguerreotype.

Distance to Vega can be determined by measuring its parallax shift against the background stars as the Earth orbits the Sun.

Vega is one of six A0V stars that were used to set the initial mean values for this photometric system when it was introduced in the 1950s.

The magnitude of Vega was measured again in 1981 at the David Dunlap Observatory and showed some slight variability.

Vega became the first solitary main-sequence star beyond the Sun known to be an X-ray emitter when in 1979 it was observed from an imaging X-ray telescope launched on an Aerobee 350 from the White Sands Missile Range.

In 1983, Vega became the first star found to have a disk of dust.

At present, Vega has more than twice the mass of the Sun and its bolometric luminosity is about 40 times the Sun's.

Energy flux from Vega has been precisely measured against standard light sources.

The visual spectrum of Vega is dominated by absorption lines of hydrogen; specifically by the hydrogen Balmer series with the electron at the n=2 principal quantum number.

The X-ray emission from Vega is very low, demonstrating that the corona for this star must be very weak or non-existent.

However, this discrepancy can be explained if Vega is a rapidly rotating star that is being viewed from the direction of its pole of rotation.

Radial velocity of Vega is the component of this star's motion along the line-of-sight to the Earth.

Models fitted to the dust distribution around Vega indicate that it is a 120-astronomical-unit-radius circular disk viewed from nearly pole-on.

The disk of dust is produced as radiation pressure from Vega pushes debris from collisions of larger objects outward.

The inclination of planetary orbits around Vega is likely to be closely aligned to the equatorial plane of this star.

In Zoroastrianism, Vega was sometimes associated with Vanant, a minor divinity whose name means "conqueror".

Related searches