Pluto and it's 14 new neighbours

Beyond Neptune's orbit, roughly five billion miles from the sun, the solar system can seem like a dark, desolate place.

But like the murky depths of the ocean, the darkness hides millions of mysterious bodies—or at least, so we think.

Known collectively as trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, the first of this population to be discovered was Pluto in 1930. Since then we've found a thousand or so objects in Pluto's domain. Some have even been given exotic names, such as Chaos, Ixion, Quaoar, and Rhadamanthus.

A chart of the largest known trans-Neptunian objects as of 2007.
—Image courtesy NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

So far, two probes have ventured that deep into the solar system (that'd be Voyager 1 and 2) but neither one paid much heed to TNOs on their way farther afield.

That means astronomers using Earthly telescopes can only guess at how many bodies are out there, what they look like, and what they're made of.

Now, using archived pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, a team of scientists has found a way to spot TNOs, and they've added 14 more to the catalog.

"Trans-Neptunian objects interest us because they are building blocks left over from the formation of the solar system," lead author Cesar Fuentes, formerly with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and now at Northern Arizona University, said in a press release.

The trick to finding them is to look for the equivalent of meteor streaks in Hubble shots of other objects.