It took the combined power of Hubble and JWST to understand exactly how the material in this disk is distributed. The starlight from Vega has pushed away all the smoke-sized particles seen by Hubble further away, while JWST sees the dust grains as fine as sand, closer to the famous star.

In the 1997 movie "Contact," adapted from Carl Sagan's 1985 novel, the lead character scientist Ellie Arroway (played by actor Jodi Foster) takes a space-alien-built wormhole ride to the star Vega. She emerges inside a snowstorm of debris encircling the star—but no obvious planets are visible.