Subrahmanyan chandrasekhar

Chandra in his middle years (Photo: AIP) NASA's premier X-ray observatory was named the Chandra X-ray Observatory in honor of the late Indian-American Nobel laureate, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar ( pronounced: su/bra/mon'/yon chandra/say/kar). Known to the world as Chandra (which means "moon" or "luminous" in Sanskrit), he was widely regarded as one of the foremost astrophysicists of the twentieth century. Chandra immigrated in 1937 from India to the United States, where he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, a position he remained at until his death. He and his wife became American citizens in 1953. Chandra in his later years (Photo: Univ. of Chicago) Trained as a physicist at Presidency College, in Madras, India and at the University of Cambridge, in England, he was one of the first scientists to combine the disciplines of physics and astronomy. Early in his career he demonstrated that there is an upper limit — now called the Chandrasekhar limit — to the mass of a white dwarf star. A white dwarf is the last stage in the evolution of a star such as the Sun. When the nuclear energy source in the center of a star such as the Sun is exhausted, it collapses to form a white dwarf. This discovery is basic to much of modern astrophysics, since it shows that stars much more massive than the Sun must either explode or form black holes. Chandra was a popular teacher who guided over fifty students to their Ph.D.s. His research explored nearly all branches of theoretical a...

Share this • Share on Facebook: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar – Facts Share this content on Facebook Facebook • Tweet: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar – Facts Share this content on Twitter Twitter • Share on LinkedIn: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar – Facts Share this content on LinkedIn LinkedIn • Share via Email: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar – Facts Share this content via Email Email this page Subramanyan Chandrasekhar Facts Subramanyan Chandrasekhar The Nobel Prize in Physics 1983 Born: 19 October 1910, Lahore, India (now Pakistan) Died: 21 August 1995, Chicago, IL, USA Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Prize motivation: “for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars” Prize share: 1/2 Work Stars in the universe form from clouds of gas and dust. When these clouds are pulled together by gravitational force, energy is released in the form of heat. And when a high enough temperature is reached, reactions among the atomic nuclei in the star’s interior begin. Beginning in the 1930s, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar formulated theories for the development that stars subsequently undergo. He showed that when the hydrogen fuel of stars of a certain size begins to run out, it collapses into a compact, brilliant star known as a white dwarf. To cite this section MLA style: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Thu. 15 Jun 2023.

Share this • Share on Facebook: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar – Biographical Share this content on Facebook Facebook • Tweet: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar – Biographical Share this content on Twitter Twitter • Share on LinkedIn: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar – Biographical Share this content on LinkedIn LinkedIn • Share via Email: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar – Biographical Share this content via Email Email this page Subramanyan Chandrasekhar Biographical I was born in Lahore (then a part of British India) on the 19th of October 1910, as the first son and the third child of a family of four sons and six daughters. My father, Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyar, an officer in Government Service in the Indian Audits and Accounts Department, was then in Lahore as the Deputy Auditor General of the Northwestern Railways. My mother, Sita (neé Balakrishnan) was a woman of high intellectual attainments (she translated into Tamil, for example, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House), was passionately devoted to her children, and was intensely ambitious for them. My early education, till I was twelve, was at home by my parents and by private tuition. In 1918, my father was transferred to Madras where the family was permanently established at that time. In Madras, I attended the Hindu High School, Triplicane, during the years 1922-25. My university education (1925-30) was at the Presidency College. I took my bachelor’s degree, B.Sc. (Hon.), in physics in June 1930. In July of that year, I was awarded a Governm...

Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (“Chandra”) ( b. 19 October 1910 in Lahore, British India [later Pakistan]; d. 21 August 1995 in Chicago, Illinois), Nobel laureate and one of the foremost scientists of the twentieth century, known for his wide-ranging contributions to physics, astrophysics, and applied mathematics. Chandrasekhar, known simply as “Chandra” in the scientific world, was one of ten children of Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyar, an officer in the British government service, and Sitalakkshmi Balakrishnan, a woman of great talent and intellectual attainments who played a pivotal role in Chandrasekhar’s career. Chandrasekhar’s early education took place at home under the tutelage of his parents and private tutors. When he was twelve, his family moved to Madras, where he began his regular schooling at the Hindu High School in Triplicane, which he attended from 1922 to 1925. Chandrasekhar then received his university education at the Presidency College in Madras. He earned a bachelor of science degree with honors in physics in 1930, and was awarded a Government of India scholarship for graduate studies at Chandrasekhar left India for England in July 1930. At Cambridge he became a research student under the supervision of the pioneering theoretical astrophysicist Ralph Howard Fowler. He spent the third year of his graduate scholarship in Copenhagen, Denmark, at Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics before completing work on his Cambridge Ph.D. in the summer of 19...

Lived 1910 – 1995. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an astrophysicist. He discovered that massive stars can collapse under their own gravity to reach enormous or even infinite densities. Today we call these collapsed stars neutron stars and black holes. Early Life and Education India Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born on October 19, 1910 in Lahore, British India. (Lahore is now in Pakistan.) He was the third of ten children in a well-educated family: his mother was a translator, who taught her children to read, while his father was Deputy Auditor General of the Northwestern Railways. The Nobel Prize winning physicist In 1922, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar became a student at the Hindu High School, Triplicane, Madras, where he was educated until 1925. Then, aged just 14, he began studying for a physics degree at Presidency College, also in Madras. (The city of Madras is now known as Chennai.) In 1929, aged 18, he wrote his first academic paper, The Compton Scattering and the New Statistics. The following year, he graduated with a B.Sc. Honors degree in physics. Advertisements Cambridge and Europe Chandrasekhar had already been identified as having extraordinary potential in physics; as a result of this he was awarded a scholarship to study for a Ph.D. degree at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. His supervisor at Cambridge was the physicist and astronomer Ralph Fowler. While traveling by ship from India to Britain in 1930, Chandrasekhar reviewed Fowler’s and oth...

Chandrasekhar was awarded the Gold Medal of the An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure (1939), Principles of Stellar Dynamics (1942), Radiative Transfer (1950), Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stability (1961), Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (1987), and Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader (1995). This article was most recently revised and updated by