The dwarf planet Haumea (formerly 2003 EL61) is one of the largest and most unusual objects in the Kuiper belt. Several investigations of Haumea over the last few years have revealed an interesting array of exciting yet puzzling features: rapidly rotating, spectrally unusual, orbited by two massive interacting satellites, and progenitor to the only known collisional family in the Kuiper belt. All of these are signs of an ancient collision, but despite all we know, there are still some mysteries about Haumea and we still lack a fully self-consistent story for its formation. I will discuss our understanding of Haumea, its collisional family, and its satellites within the context of the formation of the Kuiper belt. I will investigate the competing models that have been recently presented to explain Haumea's formation and propose new observations and theory that can determine which model is correct with ensuing consequences for our understanding of the formation of the outer solar system. As a somewhat-related aside, I will also discuss some of my recent work on the anticipated value of exoplanetary systems where multiple planets are observed to transit the same parent star. Though no such systems have been discovered yet, it is very likely that the Kepler mission will find them and will be able to exploit their unique value. Indeed, I propose that these distant multi-transiting systems will be the most information-rich planetary systems outside our own solar system.
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