Its eclipsing nature and apparent magnitude make it very useful for constraining the properties of luminous hydrogen-rich WR stars.

[11] The masses of the two stars can be determined fairly accurately because WR 22 is an eclipsing binary.

About two million years ago, WR22 would have been an even hotter O type main sequence star with a mass of around 120 M☉.

It will soon exhaust the hydrogen in its core and evolve into a classical hydrogen-poor WR star, possibly after a period as a luminous blue variable,[11] then explode as a supernova.

[citation needed] The secondary star is expected to have a more traditional evolution into a red hypergiant in a few million years time.