S. Chandrasekhar: The Physicist Who Was Right All Along

At 19, on a ship from India to England, a young physicist worked out that stars have a maximum stable mass. In 1935, a towering senior astronomer stood up in London and publicly tore the idea apart. It took nearly 50 years, and a Nobel Prize, to prove the 19-year-old right.

MCQ Questions

S. Chandrasekhar

1.44

The Chandrasekhar Limit, in solar masses

Worked out at age 19, on a ship from India to England, in 1930.

Nobel Prize

1983, Physics

Shared with William A. Fowler, for stellar evolution.

Public Rejection

1935

Eddington publicly dismissed the theory at a London meeting.

Family Link

C.V. Raman’s Nephew

India’s only two Physics Nobel laureates, uncle and nephew.

NASA Legacy

Chandra Observatory

X-ray telescope, launched 23 July 1999, named after him.

University of Chicagomcqquestion.com

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Contents

• 1Must Know
• 2Good to Know
• 3Test Yourself
• 4Great to Know

Must Know

• Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born on 19 October 1910 in Lahore, into a Tamil family. He died on 21 August 1995, in Chicago.
• In 1930, at age 19, aboard the ship taking him from India to graduate study in England, Chandrasekhar worked out that white dwarf stars have a maximum possible mass.
• This limit, later named the Chandrasekhar limit, is about 1.44 times the mass of the Sun. Beyond it, a collapsing star does not settle into a stable white dwarf. It instead becomes a supernova, a neutron star, or a black hole.
• Chandrasekhar joined the University of Chicago in 1938, and became a US citizen in 1953.
• He won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with William A. Fowler, for his work on the structure and evolution of stars.

Good to Know

• On 11 January 1935, Chandrasekhar presented his theory at a Royal Astronomical Society meeting in London, at the invitation of senior astronomer Arthur Eddington.
• Eddington instead used his own remarks to publicly reject the theory. He argued there should be “a law of nature” to stop a star from behaving “in this absurd way.”
• This public rejection, from a hugely respected figure, delayed wide acceptance of the Chandrasekhar limit for decades.
• Chandrasekhar was the nephew of C.V. Raman, the 1930 Physics Nobel laureate. They remain India’s only two Nobel laureates in Physics, an uncle-and-nephew pair.

Test Yourself

Please wait…

1. Chandrasekhar first worked out the theory behind the Chandrasekhar limit at age 19, in 1930. Where was he when the idea occurred to him?

In a university lecture hall in Cambridge

At his family home in Lahore

At a conference in Chicago

Aboard the ship taking him from India to England

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Great to Know

• NASA‘s Chandra X-ray Observatory, launched on 23 July 1999, is named after Chandrasekhar. It studies the very phenomena, neutron stars, black holes, and supernovae, that his theoretical work first predicted.
• The Eddington episode is a cautionary case about scientific authority. A correct young researcher was publicly overruled by a more senior, more famous figure, and it took nearly 50 years for the physics community to fully accept he had been right all along.
• Chandrasekhar’s story shares a theme with other pioneering Indian scientists this window: recognition delayed, not denied. See SciTech0004 — Achievements of Indians in Science and Technology for the wider picture.
• Unusually, Chandrasekhar spent much of his career unable to prove the very insight that later won him the Nobel. He worked on multiple other major problems in astrophysics in the intervening decades, rather than pursuing only vindication.