Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born on 19October 1910 in Lahore His father.
Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya lyer was an officer in the Indian Audits and
Accounts Department. His mother Sitalakshmi was a woman of high intellectual
attainments. Sir CV. Raman the first Indian to get the Nobel Prize in
science, was his paternal uncle Till the age of 12 Chandrasekhar was
educated at home by his parents and private tutors. In 1922 at the age of 12
he attended the Hindu High School.
He joined the Madras Presidency College in 1925. Chandrasekhar passed his
Bachelors (Honours) in physics in June 1930. In July 1930, he was awarded a
Government of India scholarship for graduate studies in Cambridge, England
and completed his PhD at Cambridge in the summer of 1933.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar is best known for his discovery of what is known
as the 'Chandrasekhar Limit. He showed that there is a maximum mass which
can be supported against gravity by pressure made up of electrons and atomic
nuclei. The value of this limit is about 1.44 times a solar mass. The
Chandrasekhar Limit plays a crucial role in understanding the stellar
evolution. If the mass of a star exceeded this limit, the star would not
become a white dwarf but it would continue to collapse under the extreme
pressure of gravitational forces. The formulation of the Chandrasekhar Limit
led to the discovery of neutron stars and black holes. Depending on the
mass, there are three possible final stages of a star-white dwarf, neutron
star and black hole.
Apart from the discovery of the Chandrasekhar Limit, major works done by
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar includes: stellar dynamics, including the theory
of Brownian motion (1938-43); the theory of radiative transfer, including
the theory of stellar atmospheres and the quantum theory of the negative ion
of hydrogen and the theory of planetary atmospheres, which again comprised
the theory of the illumination and the polarization of the sunlit sky
(1943-50); hydrodynamic and hydro magnetic stability, including the theory
of the Rayleigh-BĂ©nard convection (1952-61); the equilibrium and the
stability of ellipsoidal figures of equilibrium, partly in collaboration
with Norman R. Lebovitz (1961-68); the general theory of relativity and
relativistic astrophysics (1962-71); and the mathematical theory of black
holes (1974-83).Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was awarded (iointly with the
nuclear astrophysicist W.A. Fowler) the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. He
died on 21 August 1995.
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