SUBRAHMANYAN CHANDRASEKHAR

The man who unlocked the secrets of stellar evolution

Born in the Punjab province of India in 1910, Chandrasekhar’s stellar career in physics got off to an early start. His education took him through one of the oldest secondary schools in southern India, the Hindu High School in Chennai, before he moved on to Presidency College, where he wrote his first paper, called The Compton Scattering and the New Statistics. He graduated in June 1930 and was awarded a scholarship in July to study at the University of Cambridge in England. It was here he began to make waves in the field of astronomy.

As someone who was primarily concerned with systems and the methods in which scientists study and structure their research, Chandrasekhar was able to turn his intensely logical mind to bringing greater definition to existing theories in many different areas. He studied under the great quantum physicist Paul Dirac, who in turn recommended he spend the last few months of his postgraduate studies in Copenhagen at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, where Chandrasekhar met another great 20th-century physicist, Niels Bohr.

By this point his work had attracted some attention and earned him several awards, including a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. It was here that he had a runin with Sir Arthur Eddington, who disputed Chandrasekhar’s mathematical interpretation of degenerate physics in dwarf stars – a precursor to the theory of black holes and at the time a seemingly ridiculous concept, even though Chandrasekhar would later be proven correct. It prompted Chandrasekhar to look overseas for work, and with this being the late 1930s, Naziism was gradually consuming Europe. He decided to move to America.

In 1937, Chandrasekhar was employed as an assistant professor by the University of Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his career. He turned his mathematical prowess to the war effort in the early 1940s, contributing to the manufacture of materials that would ultimately become part of the world’s first atomic weapons. Following World War II, he became an American citizen and continued to make considerable contributions to physics and astronomy. He studied black hole theory in the 1970s, resulting in a paper titled The Mathematical Theory of

Black Holes. In 1983, Chandrasekhar was finally vindicated in his 50-year-old argument with the late Eddington, as his paper on the upper threshold of white dwarf stars won him the

Nobel Prize for physics.

Chandrasekhar died of a heart attack in his adopted city of Chicago on 21 August 1995, aged 84. His work formed the core tenets of stellar dynamics, and today is central to our understanding the evolution of stars and what happens when they die.