Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Born: 19th October 1910

Died:  21st August 1995

Shri Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born on 19th October 1910 in a Tamil family, Lahore. He was the nephew of Dr. C V Raman, the Nobel Prize-winning Indian physicist (1930) for his work in the field of light scattering. Chandrasekhar did his graduation in 1930 from the Presidency College, Chennai (then Madras). He joined the University of Cambridge for higher studies after the government awarded him the scholarship and completed his Ph.D. in 1933. ‘The Chandrasekhar Limit’ (which explained the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star) is the most important contribution that he gave in the field of science. His calculations made others understand supernovas, neutron stars, and black holes, which were identified in 1972. Besides other fields, Chandrasekhar also contributed to the theory of colliding gravitational waves. Chandrasekhar, also referred to as Chandra was a genius child, who just at the age of 20, published his first research paper and developed his theory of star evolution. At the age of 26, he was appointed as a deputy professor at the University of Chicago, where he spent the rest of his career. Later he was elected as a member of the Royal Society of London (the world’s oldest scientific organization) in 1944. Chandra immigrated from India to the United States, in 1937. In 1980, Chandra got retired from the University of Chicago but stayed there as a post-retirement researcher. Chandra published an outstanding work on the mathematical theory of black holes, in 1983. During World War II, he also researched for the US Army and was invited to join the Manhattan Project (which produced the world’s first nuclear bombs), unfortunately, the delays in the processing of his security clearance stopped him from contributing to the project. Sixteen years after immigration to the US, Chandrasekhar & his wife were granted US citizenship in 1953. Chandra was also a good and popular teacher under whose guidance over fifty students had completed their PhDs. Chandra published ten books, each of them covering a different topic because his research explored nearly all branches of theoretical astrophysics. He served as the editor of the Astrophysical Journal and made it a world-class publication. Chandra won The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 and also won a Bruce Medal in 1952. Other than this he was honoured with many awards. Chandrasekhar died on 21st August 1995 due to a heart attack at the University of Chicago hospital. In his honour, NASA’s premier X-ray observatory was named the Chandra X-ray Observatory. 

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