Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, known universally as "Chandra," determined the maximum mass at which a dying star can form a stable white dwarf — the Chandrasekhar limit of about 1.4 solar masses. Stars above this limit face a more dramatic fate: collapse into a neutron star or black hole. Remarkably, Chandrasekhar derived this result at the age of 19, during a sea voyage from India to England in 1930. When he presented his findings to the Royal Astronomical Society, Arthur Eddington publicly ridiculed the idea that a star could collapse without limit. This controversy haunted Chandrasekhar for years, but he was ultimately vindicated. Chandrasekhar spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, making fundamental contributions to an extraordinary range of topics: stellar structure, radiative transfer, hydrodynamic stability, black hole physics, and the mathematical theory of general relativity. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is named in his honor.

• Derived the Chandrasekhar limit (1.4 solar masses) for white dwarfs • Showed that massive stars must collapse beyond the white dwarf stage • Nobel Prize in Physics (1983) for stellar structure and evolution • Fundamental contributions to radiative transfer and black hole physics • NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory named in his honor