It is a member of the Local Group of galaxies, albeit an extremely isolated one; it is one of only a few known Local Group members for which a past close approach to the Milky Way or Andromeda Galaxy can be ruled out, based on its current location and velocity.

Local Group membership was firmly established only in 1999, with the derivation of a distance based on the tip of the red-giant branch method.

Its distance from the Milky Way of 3.2 ±0.2 Mly (980 ±40 kpc) means that Aquarius Dwarf is quite isolated in space.

It is one of the least luminous Local Group galaxies to contain significant amounts of neutral hydrogen and support to ongoing star formation, although it does so only at an extremely low level.

[2] Because of its large distance, the Hubble Space Telescope is required in order to study its stellar populations in detail.