Scientists have discovered an asteroid with a very unusual feature: rings.

It was discovered that a faraway asteroid named Chariklo is traveling through space with dense, narrow rings, according to CNET.

Multiple sites around South America, including the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in Chile, observed the unique asteroid.

"This is the smallest object by far found to have rings, and only the fifth body in the Solar System -- after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune -- to have this feature," the European Southern Observatory noted in a press release about the discovery.

Scientists do not know exactly how the asteroid got its rings, but they believe that they may have been created from debris from an impact with another object in space, along with ice.

The icy asteroid orbits the sun between Uranus and Saturn. One of Chariklo's rings is just over four miles wide, while the other ring is under two miles wide. The rings were found during a normal observation when the asteroid passed in front of a star.

"We weren't looking for a ring and didn't think small bodies like Chariklo had them at all, so the discovery -- and the amazing amount of detail we saw in the system -- came as a complete surprise!" says Felipe Braga-Ribas, the lead author of a paper on the find, which is published in the journal Nature.

Chariklo is named for a mythological nymph who was married to a centaur.

The rings have been given their own names, Oiapoque and Chuí, which are two rivers in Brazil.

Chariklo's rings indicate that the asteroid may also have a small moon, or that the rings could eventually evolve into a moon.