There's an exclusive group of celestial bodies in our solar system known to possess planetary ring systems. The most famous is Saturn, of course, but Uranus, Neptune and Jupiter also sport understated dusty rings.

Scientists recently discovered the minor planet Chariklo is surrounded by rings, and even more recent findings show a second similar object has the same features.

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The objects are members of a class of minor planets called centaurs, which have qualities of both asteroids and comets. In the past researchers believed centaurs were dormant but these new findings suggest otherwise.

Now a second centaur called Chiron has been discovered to also have rings, revealing that far from being a frozen and inactive subclass of solar system bodies, centaurs may be a lot livelier than thought.

"It's interesting, because Chiron is a centaur - part of that middle section of the solar system, between Jupiter and Pluto, where we originally weren't thinking things would be active, but it's turning out things are quite active," said Amanda Bosh, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.

An object without surrounding material would exhibit a straightforward pattern, but the observations of Chiron revealed symmetrical features, suggesting gas or dust could be blocking some of the starlight.

The researchers believe the rings could have been formed when another body broke up, generating debris that was pulled into the centaur's orbit. The debris could have also been leftover from the creation of Chiron itself.

Using two powerful telescopes in Hawaii, NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network at Haleakala, Bosh's team was able to precisely measure another occultation event in 2011, revealing even more detail in Chiron and the space surrounding it.

First discovered in 1977, it became apparent centaurs were, on the whole, fairly dormant.

Like their mythological counterpart -- which is part man, part animal -- celestial centaurs possess qualities of comets and asteroids. They are undoubtedly rocky, dusty objects, but in the 1980′s astronomers noted comet-like activity on the large centaur Chiron.

Their research was published in the journal, Icarus.

TagsSaturn-Like Rings Found Around Minor Planet Chiron, saturn ring, saturn ring system, minor planet Chariklo, Chariklo, second minor planet Chiron, Chiron, centaurs, hybrid asteroid comet, asteroid, comet, planet rings, space exploration