At a magnitude of 0.97 [1], Spica, also known as Alpha Virginis, is the brightest star system in the constellation Virgo and is either the 15th or 16th brightest star in sky depending on which reference you use and the variations in the brightness of this star relative to the brightness of Antares [2, 3]. Because the constellation Virgo looks like a complete mess of relatively bright stars, I would have difficulty describing how to pick out Spica in the constellation. Instead, I recommend finding the constellation Leo, which looks like a triangle and a reversed question mark, and then looking for the really bright star system to the southeast of the triangle. You may have noticed that I referred to Spica as a star system and not a star, and that is because it is a binary star system, but I'll get to that in a little bit.
Spica's name is best understood by first understanding the constellation Virgo. Virgo is often described as the virgin or as the maiden, and while a lot of people might assume that the constellation represents a generic maiden, it actually represents a very specific mythological woman. Which mythological woman the coonstellation represents seems to depend on the specific civilization and the specific myth taken from that civilization, but the person most commonly associated with Virgo today in Western culture is Dike, the Greek goddess of justice [4], whom you would have never heard of unless you studied the history of the constellation Virgo. The name of the star Spica is derived from the Latin word "ear of wheat" [5], as the goddess was supposed to be holding this in one of her hands in the constellation. Interestingly, many of the other mythological women associated with Virgo are also holding ears of wheat, and Spica seems to always represent that ear [5].
Spica was identified as a binary star system in 1889 by Hermann C. Vogel [6], a German astronomer who pioneered the use of spectroscopy in astronomy. He noted that the dark lines in the spectra of Spica seemed to be Doppler shifted in a way that was consistent with two stars orbiting each other in a rather close orbit. Sicne then, the star system has been extensively studied, in large part because it is possible to use the measurements of the motions of the stars in the system as well as measurements of the distance to the star system, which is 251 light years (77 pc) [7], to derive very accurate measurements of the properties of the stars, especially their masses.
The two stars in the Spica system are both very hot and very blue, which is clearly not the color of an ear of wheat (unless the ancient Greeks or Babylonians or someone were doing some advanced work in agricultural crossbreeding. Anyway, the more massive star is 11.4 times the mass of the Sun, and the less massive star is 7.2 times the mass of the Sun [8]. The larger star also pulses and therefore varies in brightess, which complicates understanding the star system, but at the same time, it also provides an opportunity to study this type of pulsation in detail. The two stars are separated by a distance equivalent to 28 times the radius of the Sun [8]. The stars are sufficiently separated that their outer gas layers stay gravitationally bound; this is not a situation where one star is stripping material away from the other star. The two stars orbit each other on a time period of very close to 4 days, which is quite rapid [8]. Also, the stars are estimated to be about 12.5 million years old, which is quite young [8].
Very bright blue stars like the ones found in the Spica system are generally expected to completely ionize the interstellar hydrogen gas around them. This is something that is commonly seen in lots of places where these stars are forming, like, for example, the Orion Nebula, the Lagoon Nebula, and the Trifid Nebula, but these are places with relatively high interstellar gas densities. Spica sits in a location with really low interstellar gas densities, so it took a very long time for astronomers to find the ionized gas, but it was eventually definitively identified in 1985 [9]. Since then, this really faint ionized gas has been really important for astronomers to study because it allows them to relate the amount of ionized gas around the star system to the mass of the stars themselves [10, 11]. A lot of astronomers, including me, use the light from ionized gas in other galaxies to determine how rapidly they are forming these massive stars, which is related to the overall rate at which all stars form, so these studies of the ionized gas around Spica are actually quite important, although I would have problems figuring out whether studying the ionized gas is more important than very precisely measuring the properties of the stars in the Spica system itself.