Under the Martinborough Stars

The star Vega is easy to spot at the moment in spring. Look in the north and Vega is a very pretty bright star near the horizon. You might recognise the name, it is the main focus of Carl Sagan’s famous book Contact, where a young scientist detects a signal from a faraway star. After a long arduous process a team creates a wormhole transport device that takes them to the centre of the galaxy. There they speak at length with aliens but can bring back no proof of the contact—so that when they return home nobody believes them.

Vega is the brightest star in Lyra and fifth brightest star in the sky.  You’ll remember that the brightest star in a constellation is the alpha star, followed by beta, gamma, delta etc. Vega’s proper name is Alpha Lyrae, but because it is a particularly bright star it is best known as Vega.

Vega is a pretty close star to our Solar System, a real stellar neighbour. It’s only 25 light years away. The light from the star left it 25 years ago, so you are seeing Vega, and all the stars in the sky in the past. If like me, you think that wasn’t that long ago, here are some headlines to what happened in 1996.

Dolly the sheep becomes the first mammal to be successfully cloned, Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales get divorced, Mad Cow Disease hits Britain and The IBM supercomputer named Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov in chess for the first time. The light from Vega left in 1996 when all this excitement was going on and has just reached us now in 2021.

Astronomers know a lot about Vega and has been extensively studied by astronomers, leading it to be termed “arguably the next most important star in the sky after the Sun”. In the northern Hemisphere, Vega was the northern pole star around 12,000 BC, lying directly above the North Pole and it will be again in the year 13,727. Please don’t wait up.  

Ok, now I want you to close your eyes and imagine a blue white star, double the size of our sun, spinning quickly and a band of dust around it, like our asteroid belt. Like most of us in middle age, it is slightly bulged around its middle, the equator. 

Vega is 455 million years old, and we expect it to last to a billion, that’s a lot of candles, when it will lose its outside layers and turn into a white dwarf. Nearly every star you see in the sky is likely to have at least one planet. Our 8 Solar system planets certainly aren’t special.  

Vega is a pretty famous star, it’s in many TV shows, films and games like Babylon 5, Star Trek, Spaceballs and Portal. Now you have seen the star and you know a bit more about it, grab a copy of Contact and dream about meeting aliens. 

Becky Bateman runs the nomadic astro-tourism business Under The Stars