When Sakura encounters an Akatsuki ring, she has the ability to summon a penguin from it.
Akatsuki rings are made of pure light, said in by Naruto to be “compressed”; they contain no hard particles. So they have no physical properties and exist simply as spheres of pure light. It’s possible that this strange arrangement is what allows them to interact with the human world at all and Sakura’s powers are something special (a genetically passable quirk or some other.) But really we don’t know more than Sakura does because the nature of her power is nowhere near fully understood. The answer is Tenten’s: unknown.