Vega is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Lyra. It is 25 light-years from the Sun and is one of the most luminous stars in the Sun’s neighborhood. The traditional name Vega comes from a loose transliteration of the Arabic word wāqi’ meaning ‘landing’ or ‘the falling eagle’
About Vega in brief
Vega is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Lyra. It is 25 light-years from the Sun and is one of the most luminous stars in the Sun’s neighborhood. Vega was the northern pole star around 12,000 BC and will be so again around the year 13,727, when its declination will be +86° 14′. With a declination of +38. 78°, Vega can only be viewed at latitudes north of 51° S. Vega has an unusually low abundance of the elements with a higher atomic number than that of helium. The traditional name Vega comes from a loose transliteration of the Arabic word wāqi‘ meaning ‘landing’ or ‘the falling eagle’. In 2016, the International Astronomical Union organized a Working Group on Star Names to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN’s first bulletin of July 2016 included a table of the first two batches of names approved by the W GSN; which included Vega for this star. The star is now so entered in the IAU Catalog of Star Names. Vega can often be seen near the zenith in the mid-northern latitudes during the evening in the Northern Hemisphere summer. From mid-southern latitudes, it can be seen low above the northern horizon during the Southern Hemisphere winter. Around July 1, Vega reaches midnight culmination when it crosses the meridian at that time. Through precession, the pole star will again pass near Vega around AD 14,000.
This is the approximate shape of a triangle with its right angle located at its right edge. This triangle lies at a vertice of a widely spaced star called the Summer Triangle, which consists of Vega plus Deneb, Aquila, and Deneus Cygnus Aquila plus two-magnitude stars Altair, Altair and Cybus Aquilae. Vega is only about a tenth of the age of the Sun, but since it is 2. 1 times as massive, its expected lifetime is also one tenth of that of the Solar System. It was the first star other than the Sun to be photographed and the first to have its spectrum recorded. It 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. From Earth, Vega is observed from the direction of one of these poles. The direction of the Earth’s axis of rotation gradually changes over time in a process known as the precessiones. Each night the positions of the stars appear to change as the Earth rotates. However, when a star is located along the same position and thus is called a pole star, it will remain in the sameposition and thus are called a Vega-like star. At present the star is only five degrees away from Polaris, but around 12,.000 BC it was pointed five degrees from the pole.
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This page is based on the article Vega published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
