VEGA (Alpha Lyra) is one of the most famed stars of the sky. At
magnitude zero, it is the sky's fifth brightest star, falling just behind
Arcturus and just ahead of Capella. It is also one of the closer stars to
the Earth, lying just 25 light years away. Though its proximity helps
make it bright in our skies, it is also inherently luminous, some 50
times brighter than our Sun. Vega is a classic main sequence star,
like the Sun quietly running off the nuclear fusion of hydrogen deep in
its core. Its color and apparent brightness made it the basic standard
against which the apparent magnitudes of all other stars are ultimately
compared.
Vega was one of the first stars to be discovered with a large
luminous infrared-radiating halo that suggests a circumstellar cloud of
warm dust. Since Vega seems to be rotating with its pole directed
toward the Earth, the dust cloud probably represents a face-on disk that
may not be unlike the disk surrounding the Sun and that contains the
planets. Several other stars similar to Vega (Beta Pic and
Fomalhault for example) possess similar disks.
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