If you were of the belief that ring around the planet is a special feature that is limited to only Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and Saturn then you are highly mistaken. Recently, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, have discovered a mini planet that has two rings around it of ice and pebbles.

It is one-of-its-kind discovery. The planet named Chariklo was located in the Kuiper Belt, which is said to have thousands of dwarf planets and comets in orbit. But it was thrown out from that belt and is now between Saturn and Uranus, where there is a collection of small objects called Centaur.

Chariklo is located 2 billion km in the solar system. Though the object has been known for past few years, rings around it were never observed before. Now, the discovery has been made due to the Danish telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Uffe Grae Jorgensen from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen explained that the camera was built at the institute to look out for exoplanets. But they used their observation time to follow Chariklo as it passed in front of a star.

Usually, when an object passes in front of a star a decline is noticed in the star's brightness level. But scientists also noticed a dip in the brightness outside the object. It was then they realized that there was a ring of material in a disc around the planet.

"We were not even looking for rings, because they had never been observed around small objects like Chariklo, so it is a totally surprising discovery", said Jorgensen. The two rings are separate thin rings and are 3 and 7 km wide and not thick more than a few hundred meters. The total distance between the centers of the two rings is 14 km and a wide gap of 9km between them.

For now, it is not known what led to the formation of rings. But Grae said that another celestial body might have crashed into Chariklo and material that came out formed the rings.