Haumea

dwarf planet · ice world · solar system · weird shapes

Shaped like an egg. Haumea is so stretched out and squished that it looks like a giant cosmic egg instead of a round ball like Earth. Its odd shape comes from spinning incredibly fast, completing one full rotation every 3.9 hours.

Found in 2004. Astronomers led by Mike Brown at Caltech discovered Haumea, but the credit goes to José Luis Ortiz Moreno's team in Spain who announced it in 2005 after finding it in older photos taken in 2003.

Made of ice. Haumea is a frozen world covered in water ice, living in the cold region beyond Neptune where icy bodies circle the sun in what's called the Kuiper Belt.

Has tiny moons. At least three small moons orbit around Haumea, making it more like a miniature system of its own floating in space.

Far from the sun. This dwarf planet is so distant that sunlight takes about 12 hours to reach it, making it one of the more remote worlds we know about.