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21 SMALL BODIES MAY-JUNE 2014 or Chariklo C hariklo’s rings as they would be seen by an astronaut from the surface of the asteroid. [ESO/L.Calçada/NickRisinger] C hiron’s wife (and daughter of Apollo), Chariklo, has two rings. In the Greek mythological context this would not be unusual, but if with Chariklo we mean the asteroid catalogued with the number 10199, then the fact that it has two rings turns into something amazing. And that’s exactly the case. The news of the unexpect- ed discovery of a ring system orbiting the distant asteroid (2.4 billion kilometres from the Sun) was made official in late March by Felipe Braga-Ribas (Observatório Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro), with a press conference and an article published in the weekly journal Nature . It all started over a year ago, by drawing up a list of possible stellar occultations by the Centaurs group of asteroids and trans- Neptunian objects. The calculations had indicated that the largest known centaur, Chariklo, on 3 June 2013 would have passed in front of a star of magnitude 12.4 (UCAC4 248-108672). The centre of the v i s i b i l i t y band