Tonight there’s likely to be a bluish-white Vega parked right outside your house. Go ahead and step out and look to the left or to the right; you won’t see it. You’ll have to look up – straight up.

Almost directly above your heads during this time of the year is a bright star in the constellation Lyra. It is Vega, derived from the Arabic name of the constellation, Al Nasr al Waki, which means Swooping Eagle. Philologically speaking, Al Nasr al Waki begat Wega. Wega begat Vega. And there you are.

Let’s look under the hood of this star and see what makes it run.

Vega is 25.3 light years away, about 150 trillion miles as the crow flies. But that’s actually pretty close considering our galaxy alone is well over 100,000 light years across! Why, Vega’s almost a neighbor.

Vega is just over three times the size of our sun. That works out to a good 2.8 million miles through, which is one hefty bag of plasma. It’s all this extra mass that makes it burn a whole lot more efficiently than our own sun.

As a result, Vega gushes more than 60 times the energy that our star does, and a lot of that energy is from the destructive ultraviolet side of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Stars similar in brightness to Vega join her in making up the distinctive Summer Triangle. Bright Altair and Deneb both round out this pointy asterism that can be seen high in the heavens for a couple more months.

Vega also has the distinction of being the first star photographed by Earth-based paparazzi. In 1850, William Cranch Bond and John Adams Whipple, in a day when it was apparently stylish to use middle names, were the first to image the starry object.

On the night of July 16/17 they photographed Vega with the telescope at Harvard Observatory using the early daguerrotype process. But Vega was not content with that brief bit of notoriety. Over 100 years later, she would play yet another leading role in astronomical imaging.

Vega rotates, as all stars do. But we see it pole-on, looking down on it as it spins. New, improved images of Vega reveal to us that the star is surrounded by… well, a whole lotta crud. Since 1983 we’ve been looking down at the full face of a big dirty spinning Frisbee, with bright Vega right in the middle of it, as if she were brooding over a solar system in the making.

And just recently it was discovered that some of this crud is being blown away by the solar winds of the mother star. This present sweeping implies there was a recent rocky collision there. Could it be that two young planets, possibly the size of Pluto, have recently collided and vaporized into massive clouds of dust?

And the fate of Vega? Because it is such a big star it will exhaust its fuel much faster than our star. It’s really only a relatively young stellar object – 350 million years old, plus or minus – considerably younger than our 5 billion-year-old sun.

But according to present theories of star formation, Vega will retire from stardom in about 650 million years, fizzling out into a nondescript white dwarf. It will be lucky if it sees its one billionth birthday.

But before she fades away Vega will go out with at least one more crowd pleaser.

Because the Earth wobbles slowly on its axis, the North Star is not always the one we see now, which is Polaris. In about 10,000 more years we will have wobbled around enough such that the new North Star will be – you guessed it! - our star of the month, Vega.