Short answers, pulled from the story.
Astronomers have termed Vega "arguably the next most important star in the sky after the Sun" because of its central role in stellar science. It was the first star photographed, the first whose spectrum was captured showing absorption lines, and for decades it served as the zero-point calibration reference for the photometric brightness scale used to measure all other stars.
Vega was the northern pole star around 12,000 BCE, when Earth's rotational axis pointed within five degrees of it. Due to the precession of the equinoxes, a cycle of 25,770 years, the pole will pass near Vega again around the year 13,724.
Vega rotates once every 16.3 hours, reaching 88% of the speed that would cause it to break apart from centrifugal force. That rapid spin causes the equator to bulge outward so the equatorial radius of 2.726 solar radii is 19% larger than the polar radius, making Vega more oblate than Saturn. It also drives a temperature difference of roughly 1,848 kelvin between the hotter poles and the cooler equator.
Vega's dust disk, first detected by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite in 1983, extends to at least 815 astronomical units from the star and contains an estimated total mass about three times that of the Earth. The dust is produced by collisions between asteroid-like bodies in a debris disk analogous to the Kuiper Belt, and includes fine grains of graphite and iron and manganese oxides in the hot inner zone within roughly 0.2 astronomical units of the star.
No planet has been directly confirmed around Vega. A 2021 study analyzing 10 years of spectra detected a candidate signal with a 2.43-day period and an estimated minimum mass of 21.9 Earth masses, with only a 1% probability of being a false positive. JWST observations constrain any gap-opening planet beyond 10 astronomical units to be less massive than roughly 6 Saturn masses.
Vega has carried names and meanings across many cultures. The Assyrians called it the Judge of Heaven; the Alfonsine tables, compiled between 1215 and 1270 by order of King Alfonso X, brought its Arabic name into European astronomy. Chinese and Japanese traditions identify Vega as the weaving girl Zhinü or Orihime, separated from her husband Altair across the Milky Way and reunited once each year, the basis of Japan's Tanabata festival. Northern Polynesian peoples used Vega as a year star to mark the start of the agricultural new year.