Vega was the first star after the Sun ever photographed
On 17 July 1850, William Bond and John Adams Whipple at Harvard College Observatory pointed a daguerreotype camera at Vega and captured the first photograph of any star besides the Sun. Twenty-two years later Henry Draper recorded its spectrum, and Vega has served ever since as a yardstick against which other stars are measured.
Only 25 light-years away, Vega outshines every star closer to us and ranks fifth brightest in the night sky. Its name comes loosely from an Arabic phrase meaning the falling eagle, and the International Astronomical Union formally approved it in 2016. It marks the right-angle corner of the Summer Triangle with Altair and Deneb, and passes almost overhead on northern summer evenings.
Its scientific role is outsized. Henry Draper's 1872 photograph was the first to show absorption lines in a star's spectrum, and in 1879 William Huggins used such images to identify twelve strong lines later traced to hydrogen. Vega was among the first stars measured by parallax, anchored the zero point of the UBV brightness system, and since 1943 has been a fixed reference for classifying stars. One astronomer called it arguably the most important star in the sky after the Sun.
Physically it is a restless star. With 2.1 times the Sun's mass it burns faster, so although it is only a tenth the Sun's age, it too is nearing the middle of its hydrogen-burning life. Spinning at 236 km per second at its equator, it bulges outward and runs hotter at its poles, and we happen to view it nearly pole-on. Excess infrared light reveals a disk of dust from colliding bodies, similar to the Kuiper belt; stars with such dust are now called Vega-like. The James Webb Space Telescope found the disk remarkably smooth, without signs of giant planets sculpting it.
Earth's slowly wobbling axis traces a circle over 25,770 years. Around 12,000 BCE the pole lay just five degrees from Vega, making it the brightest of all northern pole stars, and it will hold that role again around the year 13,724. In 210,000 years it will become the brightest star in the night sky, peaking at magnitude minus 0.81 in 290,000 years.
Source: Vega
