Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an astrophysicist who is best known for is theoretical work on stellar evolution, namely neutron stars and white dwarfs. He was born in Lahore on October 19th, 1910. His parents were Sita Balakrishnan, a "woman of high intellectual attainments," and Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyar, a Government Service in the Indian Audits and Accounts Department.
Chandra was home schooled until he was twelve, and in 1922, he attended the Hindu High School in Madras. From 1925 to 1930, he attended the Presidency College and earned a bachelor's degree in physics. During his studies at Presidency College, Chandra began his work on white dwarf stars.
About a month after his graduation, Chandra was awarded a Government of India scholarship for graduate studies in Cambridge, England. While in Cambridge, Chandra conducted research under the supervision of Professor R.H. Fowler, and received his Ph.D. In addition to this, he wrote papers on his research of white dwarfs.
From 1933 to 1937, Chandra was elected a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College. While there, he proposed his idea known as astrophysical Chandrasekhar limit. This limit describes the maximum mass of a white dwarf star (about 1.44 solar masses), which is also the minimum mass above which a star collapses into a neutron star or black hole.
In 1937, he was offered a position as a Research Associate at the University of Chicago. Prior to this, in 1936, Chandra married Lalitha Doraiswamy, whom he met at the Presidency College.
At the University of Chicago, he focused his studies on stellar dynamics from 1938 to 1943. He studied radiative transfer (energy transfer through electromagnetic radiation) from 1943 to 1950. From 1952 to 1961 he studied hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability. Chandra studied figures of equilibrium (namely shapes of celestial bodies), and in 1962 he started studying relativistic astrophysics, finishing in 1971. Finally, from 1974-1983, Chandra concluded his major studies with the mathematical theory of black holes. In 1983, Chandra received the Nobel prize in physics for his theoretical studies of the physical processes important to the structure and evolution of stars.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar died from heart failure on August 21, 1995. Over his lifetime, he received 20 honorary degrees, was elected to 21 learned societies, and received many awards including: the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of London; the Rumford Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Royal Medal of the Royal Society, London; the National Medal of Science; and the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences. Chandra was honored with the naming of one of NASA's observatories after him: the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
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