Until now, rings of material in a disc have been associated with giant planets like Saturn.

Chariklo, located two billion kilometers away, between Saturn and Uranus,  is the first miniature planet with two rings of ice and pebbles. Chariklo was located in the Kuiper Belt, a collection of thousands of dwarf planets and comets in orbit beyond Neptune on the edge of our solar system, but at some point it must have been thrown out of this belt and is now between Saturn and Uranus, where there is a collection of small objects, called Centaur.


Surprising discovery of rings   


The special camera takes 40 images per second and is now sitting on the Danish telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The main purpose of the camera is to observe exoplanets, which are planets orbiting a star other than the Sun, but the sensitive camera has also shown its strength for making extremely precise observations of other objects. Credit: Jesper Skottfelt, Niels Bohr Institute


Perhaps formed by collision


How the rings were formed is a mystery, but Uffe Gråe has a hypothesis.  

