Based on parallax measurements, it is located at a distance of 154 light-years from the Sun.

[6] It is too faint to be visible to the naked eye and is classified as a BY Draconis variable that ranges in apparent visual magnitude from 8.33 down to 8.63 over a period of 22.581 hours (0.94088 days).

PZ Telescopii was originally considered to be a member of the Beta Pictoris moving group; however in a 2012 paper, James Jenkins of Universidad de Chile and colleagues used three methods to calculate its age and came up with a figure of around 24 million years—significantly older than the 12 million years of the association.

[8] This star has an orbiting debris disk calculated to span from a radius of 35 to 165 astronomical units (AU), as well as a substellar companion with about 28 or 36 times the mass of Jupiter orbiting at a distance of about 16 AU, discovered in 2009 independently by two teams.

[11][12] The companion, currently known as PZ Tel B, is thought to be a brown dwarf; however it is possible (though very unlikely) that it is an extremely large Jupiter-like planet, in which case it would be PZ Tel b, and the first such planet to be directly imaged.