On this day, one hundred and ten years ago, in the city of Lahore, a baby boy was born. The family who had only two girls were too excited to see the new boy and happily named him Subrahmanyan. Little did they know that this boy would grow up to take their family name to the list of Nobel Laureates.
Yes! we are talking about none other than Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, one of the foremost Astrophysicist of the twentieth century. Homeschooled till the age of 12, Chandrasekhar went from Presidency College Madras to Trinity College Cambridge to obtain his Master’s degree and PhD.
He was extremely interested in the nature of stars that he turned out to be an important contributor to the combination of physics and astronomy which was not a specific field back then.
Chandrasekhar marked the destiny of stars. In 1930, when scientists believed that every star would eventually burn out to become a white dwarf, Chandrasekhar was not ready to accept it. He went ahead and predicted a number, precisely 1.4 and said that white dwarfs were only formed when stars have a mass less than or equal to 1.4 times the mass of our sun.
This discovery was made by Chandrasekhar on his sail to UK. You would assume that he was immediately praised for this and accepted among the scientists. But NO, his ideas were criticised publicly by famous physicists including Arthur Eddington. And those who regarded his findings did not admit it publicly. But don’t worry, computer simulations and technological advancements later proved this theory right and in his honour the number was named Chandrasekhar limit. This limit was later on used to gather more information on supernovas, blackholes and neutron stars and still serve as a building stone in the field.
Contributions of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar does not end there. He worked on many different fields of physics ranging from evolutionary stages of massive blackholes to hydrodynamics. He published ten books on different topics in Astrophysics and worked as the editor of The Astrophysical Journal for almost two decades.
His magical hands had touched a good number of topics that Nasa’s x-ray observatory is named Chandra X-ray observatory in his memory. He was awarded the Nobel Price in physics for “ theoretical studies of the physical process of the importance of the structure and evolution of stars” in 1983.
Chandrasekhar was not only a good astrophysicist but also an elite and humble teacher who guided about fifty PhD students. On his birthday, let us all remember this Indian American Astrophysicist who crossed the seas only to bring us a Nobel prize.
Click here to read read an article about “The Evolution of Stars”
Author
