This estimate implies if it were placed at the center of the Solar System, its photosphere would extend past the orbit of Mars or even the asteroid belt.

Although the star is very luminous, it is, at its brightest, only 9th magnitude as viewed from Earth, due to its distance and location in the Zone of Avoidance within the Cygnus rift.

[15] UY Scuti is a dust-enshrouded bright red supergiant[16] and is classified as a semiregular variable with an approximate pulsation period of 740 days.

[19] In mid 2012, AMBER interferometry with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert in Chile was used to measure the parameters of three red supergiants near the Galactic Center region:[3] UY Scuti, AH Scorpii, and KW Sagittarii.

[3] A 2023 measurement based on the multimessenger monitoring of supernovae, puts the radius at a smaller value of 909 R☉, together with a smaller luminosity of 124,000 L☉ and effective temperature of 3,550 K.[11] Direct measurements of the parallax of UY Scuti published in the Gaia Data Release 2 give a parallax of 0.6433±0.1059 mas,[6] implying a closer distance of approximately 1.5 kiloparsecs (4,900 ly),[21] and consequently much lower luminosity and radius values of around 86,300–87,100 L☉ and 755 R☉ respectively.