Person · Nobel astrophysicist · India
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Also known as Chandra
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-95), who at nineteen worked out on the voyage from Madras to Cambridge (1930) that a cold stellar core of more than ~1.4 solar masses cannot be supported by electron degeneracy pressure and must collapse — the Chandrasekhar limit, foundational to white-dwarf, neutron-star and black-hole physics. Nephew of C. V. Raman; University of Chicago from 1937; Nobel Prize in Physics 1983 (with William Fowler) for his theoretical studies of stellar structure and evolution. The NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory, launched 1999, is named after him.
- Periods
- British Colonial Age, Republic and Living Practice
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Connections (1)
- Family ofC. V. Raman
Chandrasekhar was Raman's nephew — his father R. Chandrasekhara Iyer was Raman's elder brother. The young Chandra attended Raman's 1928 Bangalore lectures that unveiled the Raman effect; the next year he sailed for Cambridge, where on the voyage out he derived the mass limit that bears his own name. The two Nobels (1930, 1983) are an Indian family story.
On these journeys
Sources
Standard reference.
Open Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in the repository →