The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the "stellar corpse," called SGR 1900+14, belongs to a class of objects known as magnetars -- cores of massive stars that blew up in supernova explosions, but unlike other dead stars, they slowly pulsate with X-rays and have tremendously strong magnetic fields.

"The universe is a big place and weird things can happen," said Stefanie Wachter of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology. She said she found the ring serendipitously.

"I was flipping through archived Spitzer data of the object, and that's when I noticed it was surrounded by a ring we'd never seen before," said Wachter.

She and her colleagues think the ring, which is unlike anything ever seen before, formed in 1998 when the magnetar erupted into a giant flare. They believe the magnetar's crusty surface cracked, emitting a blast of energy that excavated a nearby cloud of dust, leaving an outer, dusty ring.

Research concerning the ring appears in the journal Nature.