Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, and the fifth brightest star in the sky. It is the third brightest star in the Northern night sky, after Sirius and Arcturus, and can often be seen near the zenith in the mid-northern latitudes during the Northern Hemisphere summer.

It is a "nearby star" at only 25.3 light years from Earth, and together with Arcturus and Sirius, one of the brightest stars in the Sun's neighbourhood.

In 2126, Travis Mayweather (later of the Enterprise) was born aboard the Horizon half way between Vega and Draylax. (ENT: "Broken Bow"). Delta Vega is also a desolate, uninhabited planet, slightly smaller than Earth, located near the galactic barrier. Known for its rich source of crystal and minerals, it served as the site of a lithium cracking station during the mid-23rd century, which was, at most, visited by ore ships every twenty years. (TOS: "Where No Man Has Gone Before"). However, this planet may not be related to Vega the star system, as Vega is near to our solar system and not the so-called Galactic Barrier.

In reality, Vega is a vertex of the Summer Triangle, which consists of Vega (in Lyra), Deneb (in Cygnus) and Altair (in Aquila). If one is to consider this asterism a right triangle, then Vega would correspond to its right angle. This triangle is very recognisable in the northern skies for there are few bright stars in its vicinity.

Its spectral class is A0V (Sirius, an A1V, is slightly less powerful) and it is firmly in the main sequence, fusing hydrogen to helium in its core. Since more powerful stars use their fusion fuel more quickly than smaller ones, Vega's life time is only one billion years, a tenth of our Sun's. Vega's current age is between 200 and 500 million years. Vega is twice as massive[1] as our Sun and burns at fifty times the power.

Vega has a disk of dust and gas around it, discovered by the IRAS satellite in the mid 1980s. This was initially thought to be a protoplanetary disk, but is now considered a "debris disk" due to the star's relatively young age of between 200 and 500 million years. In 1998 teams at the Joint Astronomy Centre and UCLA detected irregularities in it that suggest the presence of a planet.[3] A 2003 paper hypothesizes these lumps could be caused by a Neptune-sized planet having migrated from 40 to 65 AU over 56 million years[4], an orbit large enough to allow the formation of smaller rocky planets closer to Vega.[5] These findings have yet to be fully confirmed, but since Vega is much more powerful than our Sun, scientists believe there is no life possible on any such suggested planets.