Saiph has a strong stellar wind and is losing mass at the rate of times the mass of the Sun per year, or the equivalent of the Sun's mass every 1.1 million years. Using a combination of parallax as determined by Hipparcos and the spectrum yields a mass 15.50 ± 1.25 times and luminosity 56,881 times that of the Sun. Analysis of the spectra and age of the members of the Orion OB1 association yields a mass 28 times that of the Sun (from an original mass 31.8 times that of the Sun) and an age of 6.2 million years. Large stars such as Saiph (and many other stars in Orion) are destined to collapse on themselves and explode as supernovae. The Wardaman people of northern Australia regard Saiph as the Guman digging stick, used to make a canyon by Black-headed Python.