Vesta is one of the brightest asteroids, occasionally visible to the naked eye under dark skies, and one of the four main asteroids used in modern astrology, named for the Roman goddess of the hearth. At roughly 525 kilometres across it is close to Pallas in size, though its high reflectivity makes it the more conspicuous object from Earth. Vesta was the fourth of the large asteroids found, completing the group whose discovery within a single decade first suggested that a belt of minor bodies, rather than one missing planet, occupied the gap between Mars and Jupiter.
As with Ceres, Pallas and Juno, Vesta was given its own pictorial glyph at discovery, a practice astronomers abandoned for later asteroid finds once their numbers grew too large for individual symbols, but the choice preserved a distinctive emblem for Vesta that later proved essential to its adoption into twentieth-century astrological technique. Olbers, who discovered the object, handed the naming itself to Gauss in recognition of the mathematician's rapid computation of its orbit, reportedly finished within about ten hours of receiving the observations, and Gauss chose Vesta as a fitting sister name to Ceres, goddess of the hearth alongside goddess of the harvest.