When Ceres was discovered in 1801 it was hailed as a new planet. But then more objects were discovered hanging out in Ceres' neighborhood. All of a sudden it got demoted to a mere "minor" planet (Asteroid).

Ceres is tiny in the planetary scale, but it's the biggest asteroid by far - it accounts for 33% of all the mass in the asteroid belt, and the next largest asteroid is half its size. It's surface area is slightly larger than Texas. Take that lone star state!

Speaking of mothers, Ceres is named after the Roman goddess of agriculture, grain crops and motherly relationships. She also protects the transition of women from girlhood/unmarried to womanhood.

Her daughter is Persephone who Pluto kidnapped and took to Hades. Mother and daughter were eventually re-united, but because Persephone ate the forbidden fruit she must spend the winter in the underworld. During these months Ceres mourns, and that's why crops wither.

Unlike the other mesoplanets Triton is a moon, not a dwarf planet. Taken by itself it could be Pluto's sibling; it's about the same size, has the same mix of rock and ice, it has an atmosphere...

In fact scientists think Triton started out on its own, like Pluto. But at some point it was captured by Neptune's gravity. The primary evidence for this is that—unlike any other moon in the Solar System—Triton orbits Neptune in the opposite direction the planet rotates.

In Greek mythology Triton is the merman son of Poseidon (Neptune), the god of the sea.

Triton's signature accessory is a conch shell, which he blows like a trumpet to calm or raise the seas.

Recently the New Horizons zoomed past Pluto and revealed that Pluto has a pretty varied landscape. The giant heart-shaped feature is called "Sputnik PlanumPlanitia". It's about the size of two californias - one for each lobe. Underneath this sheet of nitrogen ice is a liquid ocean of water, salty as the Dead Sea and 62-miles deep.

In fact, this ocean is massive enough that it actually changed the center of gravity of Pluto so that its heart always faces away from Charon.

Pluto has a thin blue atmosphere mostly composed of methane gas. By thin, I mean about 1 Pa, which is the pressure of Earth's atmosphere right at the edge of space, 62 miles (100km) up.

Pluto isn't always as dark as this picture makes it out to be. High noon on Pluto would provide the equivilent sunlight of a few minutes after sunset on Earth.

NASA has a webpage dedicated to calculating the exact time to try it out based on your location.

Pluto's biggest moon Charon could be a dwarf planet if it didn't orbit Pluto. It's a whopping half the size of Pluto^*. It's larger than Ceres, and could be considered a dwarf planet in its own right if it had a different orbit.

It's so big that Pluto and Charon actually orbit around each other, forming a binary planet pair.

The red spot on Charon is caused by Pluto's atmosphere leaking out into space and getting sucked up by Charon's gravity, to be deposited onto Charon's north pole.

Charon is the ferryman who carries the the dead across the River Styx into Hades.

Charon charges his passengers, hence the tradition of burying the dead with coins.

Charon has a vast system of chasms and crevices, the result Charon's water insides freezing soon after its cataclysmic birth. Ice expands, and on a planetary scale this results in giant cracks in Charon's crust. The Argo Chasma is 430 miles long and 5 miles deep - twice the length of the Grand Canyon and almost as deep as the Marianas Trench.

The first dwarf planet found since Pluto, Quaoar is a small and relatively rocky object. One possible reason is that previous impacts blasted away its icy surface, like bites of a cherry revealing the hard pit.

It's named for the all-powerful god of the Tongva cult spread among the Mission Indian peoples of southern california. Our only accounts of Quaoar are from spanish missionaries, in a time of great religious upheaval with the (sometimes forcible) introduction of Christianity. This cult spread alongside the spanish's religion, possibly melding traditional religion with this new cosmology, possibly developed in opposition to it. Quaoar saved the people from his evil son, and then danced into being the heaven in stars as he rose up into the sky.

Haumea doesn't look like other dwarf planets. It's spinning fast—so fast that it's been stretched (like a spinning ball of pizza dough) into a football shape. The working theory is that long ago it experienced a catestrophic collision (imagine something the size of Alaska being hit by Pennsylvania).

That ancient collision tossed parts of Haumea into the void, and these smaller hunks of rock and ice are called the Haumea Family.

Haumea is the Hawai'ian goddess of fertility and childbirth. It's an appropriate association - just as the dwarf planet spawned a family of smaller objects from that fateful collision, Haumea spawned her many children from various parts of her body.

"Makemake gets no respect", according to astronomer Mike Brown. It's medium-sized for a dwarf planet and it's in the middle of the Kuiper Belt. It doesn't have a crazy shape like Haumea, and it doesn't have an atmosphere like Pluto and Eris.

What it does have is a red, red surface. Spectral analysis hints that the surface is covered in little pebbles of methane ice up to 1cm in size (skittles?). Unlike the rusty sands of Mars, Makemake (and other red Kuiper Belt objects) get their color by having their methane ices "burnt" by unfiltered sunlight (Makemake has no ozone layer). This results in "Tholins" - complex hydrocarbons similar to tar, oil or mud. When Carl Sagan created Tholins in the lab he found that it was readily edible by soil bacteria, lending credence to the idea that live could exist outside earth.

Makemake is the bird-man creation diety of the Rapa Nui of Easter Island. They have a challenge each year where tribe members swim to a remote island and climb rocky cliffs to retrieve the first sooty tern egg of the season. The winner was celebrated as a sacred "bird man" for months afterwards.

This planet is actually third largest in the Kuiper Belt (after Pluto and Eris). It's also one of the reddest objects in the solar system. But it hasn't been given a proper name yet, allegedly because scientists didn't know enough about it. According to twitter the discoverer just "got busy with other things". After 10 years anyone gets to propose a name, So 2017 could be it's year!

Eris is the same size as Pluto, just a smidge smaller in size, but more massive (it's more rocky, Pluto's got more ice). This was the real deciding factor in changing the status of Pluto - if Pluto was a planet then so was Eris, and if Eris, why not Haumea, Makemake, and all the rest? Fittingly enough Eris is named for the primordial goddess of chaos, strife and dischord.

Eris is one of the brightest objects in the sky. Unlike the redder dwarf planets in this list, Eris reflects 97% of the light that reaches it's orbit three times farther than Pluto from the sun. This is likely due to a cycle of its atmosphere freezing and falling from the sky like snow during its centuries-long winters.

Kuiper Belt Objects (Pluto, eris, etc) are really far from the sun. Sedna takes the distant orbit thing and turns it up to 11. Literally. Sedna has a comet-like orbit that takes it (relatively) close to Pluto's orbit (39 AU), then swings out over 900 AU from the sun. That's out to the darkest reaches of the solar system. In fact, it's orbit is so strange that it (and other smaller objects with similar orbits) are the primary evidence for a possible Neptune-sized planet lurking out in the shadows.

Cold, distant Sedna is named for the Inuit goddess of the watery underworld, and ruler of the hunt. There's many variations of her myth, but they're all pretty metal.

One describes Sedna as an independant woman who rejects marriage proposals from the hunters of her village. One day a mysterious hooded figure appears and offers her father great riches for Sedna's hand. Out of hunger (or greed) her father agreeds, and roofies her.

Sedna awakes to find herself in a large nest on a cliff, for the stranger was no man, but a giant trickster bird spirit.

The wind carries Sedna's cries to her father. Wracked by guilt he attempts to save her, but as they're paddingly home the bird-spirit sees them escaping. It beats its great wings, causing a terrible storm.

Sedna's father throws her into the raging sea, hoping to appease the angry god. She clings to the kayak, but her father grabs a little axe and chops off her fingers one by one. Her fingers became whales, seals and walruses, while she sinks to the deep, transforming into a mermaid.

She now rules the watery underworld and commands the creatures of the sea.