Subrahmanyan Chardrasekhar
By Illa Vij

The world renowned astronomer Subrahmanyan Chardrasekhar was born on October 10, 1910, in Lahore. He completed his basic education in Madras. As a child he read a lot, and took special interest in books related to physics and research journals. His interest in research became so intense, that he himself wrote papers on modern physics and around the age of 18, his research papers appeared in Indian Journal of Physics. In 1930, he graduated from Presidency College in Madras. Then he went to the University of Cambridge in England, from there he received his doctorate in physics in 1933.

Chandrasekhar was 24 years old when he began interacting with Eddington, acknowledged as the world’s finest astronomer. At this

time Chandrasekhar was doing research work on stellar structure. On January 11, 1935, he was to announce a startling discovery that he had made, at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, London. To Chandrasekhar’s dismay, Eddington also decided to speak on the same topic. Chandrasekhar revealed his research work on

the white Dwarf stage of a star. He disclosed that white dwarfs with a mass 1.4 times greater than that of the sun would continue collapsing due to their own gravitation and become neutron stars or collapse still further to become black holes. Eddington claimed the whole theory to be wrong. Eventually Chandrasekhar’s theory was accepted and black holes came to be accepted. Despite their opposing views, Eddington and Chandrasekhar continued to be friends.

In 1973, Chandrasekhar moved to the USA and joined the staff at the University of Chicago. There he put his theory in a book and began studying the distribution of stars in galaxies. He discovered that any star hurtling through a galaxy tends to slow down because of the gravity of the stars surrounding it. Then he gave the reason as to why the sky is blue. In the 19th century Britain’s Lord Rayleigh had also found the same answer, but he and the other scientists failed to unravel the exact mathematics. By the middle of 1940’s, Chandrasekhar had all the details worked out. In the 1960’s he wrote a book on ellipsoids. The book was later used by many scientists to understand what holds the milky way together as it spins.

In 1983, Chandrasekhar shared the Nobel Prize for physics with William A. Fowler. Chandrasekhar was very fond of Shakespeare, music and travelling but he could hardly pursue these interests as he was always overoccupied in his scientific research.

Despite having settled in the USA, he felt most comfortable wearing a South Indian dhoti and when he relaxed he heard Carnatic music. Having given the world a wealth of astronomical knowledge, he died in 1995.