Vesta was discovered on 29 March 1807 by Heinrich Olbers, the fourth asteroid found, and it is the brightest of them, occasionally just visible to the unaided eye. It is the second most massive body in the belt and is differentiated, with a crust, mantle and iron core, which makes it more like a small planet than a rubble pile; the Dawn spacecraft orbited it in 2011 and 2012 and imaged the enormous Rheasilvia impact basin at its south pole. A family of meteorites found on Earth, the howardite-eucrite-diogenite group, has been traced to Vesta. The name is that of the Roman goddess of the hearth, the Greek Hestia, whose sacred fire in the temple at Rome was tended by the Vestal Virgins, priestesses bound to thirty years of chastity and service. Modern astrology, from the 1970s asteroid literature onward, reads Vesta for dedication, focused service, sacred work and the withholding of the self from ordinary claims.
The Roman cult behind the name was civic rather than domestic, which sharpens the modern reading. The fire in the temple of Vesta was the hearth of the state, not of a household, and letting it go out was a public emergency requiring expiation. The six Vestals who tended it were freed from paternal authority, could make wills and give evidence, and held a legal standing no other Roman woman had, in exchange for thirty years of service and chastity enforced by burial alive for a breach. The figure the asteroid is named for is therefore not a symbol of domestic retreat but of a woman's withdrawal from private claims into public office, which is closer to the modern astrological reading than the hearth image suggests.