NASA spacecraft encounters mysterious ring surrounding the Solar System

Astronomers have discovered a myriad of mysterious objects in the outer Kuiper Belt region at the edge of the Solar System .

According to Science magazine , the biggest hypothesis is that there is a "second Kuiper Belt" lurking outside the known belt, with about the same mass.

This means the Sun's influence extends further into space than we thought.

A mysterious ring of objects has just been revealed by the New Horizons expedition - (Photo: NASA).

Beyond Neptune, which is 30 AU (astronomical units) from the Sun, our parent star extends its tentacles another 100 AU, holding onto other tiny objects orbiting it and possibly a "ninth planet."

Beyond the edge of the star system lies the Oort Cloud, a loosely held mass of comets and asteroids that stretches out to a region of space 1,000 AU from the Sun.

This mysterious belt may lie somewhere between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud . Its traces are revealed by 12 potentially massive objects as far as 60 AU from the Sun that data from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has recorded.

The New Horizons spacecraft - whose primary mission was originally to study Pluto - is now 57 AU away from its parent star.

Presenting at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, the team led by Dr. Wesley Fraser from the National Research Council of Canada said they were not surprised by the discovery.

They say the Solar System is still tiny compared to known star systems — at least for the objects and clusters of objects we know about.