August 14, 2013 David Latchman

Season 06, Episode 03: “The Higgs Boson Observation” http://youtu.be/RvX9Evd3MyM In “The Higgs Boson Observation”, we learn that the subject of graduate student and Sheldon’s (Jim Parsons) new assistant, Alex Jensen (Margo Harshman), is on Trojan asteroids at the Earth-Sun L5 Lagrange point. This also happens to be Raj’s (Kunal Nayyar) area of expertise. But what exactly are Trojan asteroids and why are they of interest to astronomers and astrophysicists? Trojans are minor planets or satellites that share an orbit with a planet but does not collide with it because it orbits around one of the two stable Lagrangian points (trojan…