Chandrasekhar - Father of the Chandrasekhar Limit for White Dwarfs

Indian-American astrophysicist who calculated the maximum mass a white dwarf star can sustain, opening the door to understanding the fate of massive stars and collapse into black holes.

الإنجازات

Calculated the «Chandrasekhar limit» in 1930 for the maximum stable mass of a white dwarf

Theoretically opened the way to understanding the collapse of massive stars into neutron stars or black holes

Awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with William Fowler

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory was named in his honor

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born in 1910 in Lahore, Punjab, British India, the nephew of Nobel laureate physicist C.V. Raman. He showed early brilliance in mathematics and physics, earning a scholarship to study astrophysics at Cambridge University in Britain.

During his sea voyage to England in 1930, at just nineteen, Chandrasekhar performed theoretical calculations showing that a white dwarf star could not remain stable if its mass exceeded a certain limit equal to about 1.44 times the mass of the Sun — what became known as the «Chandrasekhar limit». This result implied that stars more massive than this limit must collapse into a denser state, such as a neutron star or black hole.

Scientific Legacy

Chandrasekhar's ideas initially faced fierce opposition from British astronomer Arthur Eddington, prompting him to move to the United States and settle at the University of Chicago, where he spent the rest of his career. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with William Fowler, for his research on stellar evolution. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory was named in his honor, launched in 1999. He died in 1995.