We review some recent results concerning the properties of static, spherically symmetric configurations in RS2 type brane worlds: 1) Solving the trace of the effective 4D gravity equations, we obtain general classes of black hole and wormhole metrics, including families which unify symmetric wormholes, extremal black holes and non-extremal non-singular black holes. 2) Assuming Eμ ν = 0 (where Eμ ν is a part of the 5D Weyl tensor contributing to the 4D gravity equations), we show that material scalar fields confined on the brane may violate the no-hair theorem, support wormholes or form particlelike objects, but only at super-nuclear matter densities in the strong field region. 3) Solutions to the bulk field equations are found in case Eμ ν ≡ 0, among them solutions with a nonzero 4D cosmological constant, generalizing the so-called "black string". © World Scientific Publishing Company.