Parallax measurements yield an estimated distance of roughly 810 light-years (250 parsecs) from the Earth.

This is a double star with a magnitude 6.86 companion at an angular separation of 0.72 arcsecond and a position angle of 148° from the brighter primary.

[3] The Ib luminosity class indicates this a lower luminosity supergiant star that has consumed the hydrogen fuel at its core, evolved away from the main sequence, and expanded to about 235 times the Sun's radius.

[16] With a mass 11.7[7] times that of the Sun, this is a short-lived star with an estimated age of 20 million years.

Consequently, π Puppis itself is known as 弧矢九 (Hú Shǐ jiǔ, English: the Ninth Star of Bow and Arrow.