Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910 - 1995) was an Indian-American astrophysicist whose research on the structure and evolution of stars transformed modern astronomy. [1] In the early 1930s he calculated that a white dwarf above a critical mass—now known as the Chandrasekhar limit—cannot support itself against gravity and must collapse, a result central to the theory of stellar death. [2] He spent most of his career at the University of Chicago and shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theoretical studies of stellar structure. [2]
Early life and education
Chandrasekhar was born on 19 October 1910 in Lahore, then part of British India. [1] He came from a scholarly Tamil family; his uncle was the physicist C. V. Raman, a Nobel laureate. He studied at Presidency College in Madras before winning a scholarship to the University of Cambridge, where he entered Trinity College and completed his doctorate in 1933. [1]
The Chandrasekhar limit
During his voyage from India to England in 1930, Chandrasekhar applied the new physics of quantum statistics and special relativity to the interiors of white dwarf stars. He concluded that a white dwarf more massive than roughly 1.4 times the mass of the Sun could not remain stable and would continue to collapse. [1] This threshold, later called the Chandrasekhar limit, pointed toward extreme end states of stellar matter such as neutron stars and black holes. His conclusions were publicly disputed by the eminent astronomer Arthur Eddington, and the disagreement slowed their acceptance for years. [3]
Career at Chicago
In 1937 Chandrasekhar joined the University of Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his career, working for much of that time at the Yerkes Observatory. [1] For nearly two decades he served as managing editor of The Astrophysical Journal, shaping it into a leading international publication. [1] A meticulous teacher, he supervised many doctoral students and became a United States citizen in 1953. [1]
Later work and recognition
Chandrasekhar worked systematically across many fields, devoting years at a time to stellar dynamics, radiative transfer, hydrodynamic stability, and the mathematical theory of black holes, publishing a definitive monograph on each. [1] In 1983 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with William A. Fowler for theoretical studies of the physical processes important to the structure and evolution of stars. [2] His other honors included the Copley Medal, the National Medal of Science, and India's Padma Vibhushan. [1]
Legacy
Chandrasekhar's early insight into stellar collapse became a cornerstone of astrophysics and helped establish black holes and neutron stars as physical realities. [3] NASA named its Chandra X-ray Observatory, launched in 1999, in his honor. [1]
