How many miles away from the earth is the constellation Lyra?

Question

Please help

Answer 1

Impossible to answer this meaningfully. Someone was on last night asking a similar question about Ursa Minor.

A constellation is not a group of next-door stars that belong physically together and are a co-moving group (as a star cluster like the Pleiades would be), It is simply a line-of-sight phenomenon with the members all being at various different distances from Earth,

Vega is the 5th brightest star in the sky and will become the North Pole Star in about 14,000 AD.

β Lyr is a multiple star system and the prototype of β Lyr variable stars.

These are the 5 brightest stars in Lyra

Vega α Lyra 0.03 (25 light years away)
Sulaphat γ Lyra 3.25 (634 light years away)
β Lyr 3.52 (881 light years away)
R Lyr 4.08 (349 light years away)
δ2 Lyr 4.22 (898 light years away)

Over a few hundreds of thousands of years, stars that look like they are physically close together now will move apart and have a different spatial relationship to one another. Some will even move out from one constellation and move into another.

That being so, there is no one single distance from the earth to this constellation nor to any of the other 87 constellations either and your question cannot be answered meaningfully.

But we can say that all these 5 stars in Lyra are all under 1000 light years away (as are the vast majority of the stars listed for this constellation) and therefore they are all part of our galaxy and they are all very local too (in our own back yard): the galaxy is 100,000 light years across. Vega is the nearest as well as the brightest and best-known of them.

There are other elements of the constellation which are somewhat further away:

e.g. M56: a rather loose globular cluster at a distance of approximately 32,900 light years with a diameter of about 85 light years.

e.g. the Ring Nebula (also known as the Messier 57) which is among the most well known and recognisable examples of a planetary nebula. The nebula is located at 0.7 kpc (2300 light-years) from Earth.

But individual stars would not be bright enough to be seen at distances much more than 1000 ly.

Answer 2

Lyra The Constellation

Answer 3

Lyra is a constellation, a group of stars with a meaningful shape, in the night sky. Because not all stars are the same distance away, the grouping is apparent only, and generally speaking, not actual.

Alpha Lyra, also known as Vega, is about 25 ly away, while Beta Lyra is more than 800 ly away! Beta is an enourmously bright star (actually a binary system). So, you can see why it is hard to say how far away is Lyra.

HTH

Charles

Answer 4

It is meaningless to ask how far away a constellation is, since the stars in constellations are not actually physically near each other but simply appear grouped together when viewed from here.

The brightest star in Lyra is Vega, and is located about 25 light years away, which is about 147 million million miles away. However, the stars in the constellation range from that to over 2000 light years away, about twelve thousand million million miles away.