Exoplanet House of Horrors

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/exoplanetHouseOfHorrors.html

Astronomers may be closer than ever to discovering a planet that’s habitable like our own, but along the way they’ve discovered some very scary exoplanets – places where conditions are far too harsh for life as we know it to exist.

We’ve rounded up some of the most frightening, deadly exoplanets, places that make even the scariest haunted house on Earth pale in comparison

Trans-Neptunian Objects

(Wikipedia)

A trans-Neptunian object (TNO) is any object in the Solar System that orbits the Sun at a greater distance on average than Neptune. The Kuiper belt, scattered disk, and Oort cloud are three divisions of this volume of space.^[1]

The first trans-Neptunian object to be discovered was Pluto in 1930. It took more than 60 years to discover, in 1992, a second trans-Neptunian object, (15760) 1992 QB₁, with only the discovery of Pluto's moon Charon before that in 1978. Since then however, over 1,000 trans-Neptunian objects have been discovered, differing in sizes, orbits, and surface composition. 197 of these (as of March, 2009) have their orbit well enough determined that they are given a permanent minor planet designation.^[2][3]

The largest known trans-Neptunian object is Eris (discovered in 2005), followed by Pluto, Makemake and Haumea.