Depending on where you are in your timezone, Vega is currently rising around midnight for observers everywhere except the extreme north. Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, and with a distance of only 25 light-years, it has been a favorite for science fiction authors imaging novel destinations. From being the capital of the Vega Province in the Foundation series to being the home of the transmitter in Contact, and the home system of wise old Yogurt in Spaceballs, Vega comes up a lot. And now it seems that maybe, just maybe, Vega actually has at least one planet. 

According to CU-Boulder student Spenser Hurt, who did this work as part of a summer program at Harvard: It would be at least the size of Neptune, potentially as big as Jupiter, and would be closer to Vega than Mercury is to the sun. 

This planet, if it is there, is on a tiny orbit, going around its star every 2.5 days, and would be the second hottest planet so far discovered. Hurt goes on to explain: That close to Vega, he added, the candidate world might puff up like a balloon, and even iron would melt into gas in its atmosphere. 

Because Vega is about twice the mass of the Sun and rotates much faster, detecting planets around it is much harder, and more work will be needed to confirm this work, but where this is one planet, there could be more, and it’s awesome to think we may be finding the places only dreamed of in science fiction. This work is published in The Astronomical Journal.

More Information

CU-Boulder press release

“A Decade of Radial-velocity Monitoring of Vega and New Limits on the Presence of Planets,” Spencer A. Hurt et al., 2021 March 2, The Astronomical Journal