10 Facts About Astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar [1910 - 1995] was a Nobel prize winning scientist from India who is best known for studying the evolution of stars. He accepted American citizenship in 1953 and taught at the University of Chicago for almost all his life.

Following are 10 amazing facts on physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar:

1. He found the Chandrasekhar limit, currently accepted as 1.4 solar masses, which is the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star. If a star is more massive than this limit, it might end up as a black hole.

2. Chandrasekhar was tutored at home until the age of 12. In middle school, his father taught him mathematics and physics while his mother taught him Tamil and English.

3. Chandrasekhar studied at Presidency College in Chennai and the University of Cambridge. He was a long-time professor at the University of Chicago and editor of The astrophysical journal.

4. His paternal uncle was the Indian physicist and Nobel laureate C.V. Raman, who was the first Indian to win the coveted Nobel prize for discovery of Raman effect.

5. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar himself won the Nobel prize for physics in 1983 for his mathematical treatment of stellar evolution.

6. Chandra X-ray observatory, launched in 1999, is a flagship space telescope of NASA which is named after him.

7. Chandrasekhar was in dispute with English astronomer Arthur Eddington over the final stages of a star's life. Eddington, a renowned physicist, openly mocked and criticized Chandrasekhar limit in 1935.

Chandrasekhar continued to state that he admired Eddington and considered him a friend.

8. Chandra worked closely with his students and expressed pride in the fact that over a 50-year period (from roughly 1930 to 1980), the average age of his co-author collaborators had remained the same, at around 30.

9. Two of the students who took his course at University of Chicago, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, won the Nobel prize before he could get one for himself. Chandrasekhar supervised 45 PhD students in his teaching career.

10. After his death, his wife Lalitha made a gift of his Nobel Prize money to the University of Chicago towards the establishment of the Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Memorial Fellowship.

Bonus fact - Chandrasekhar was offered double salary at Princeton University in 1946 but the University of Chicago president matched the salary to keep Chandrasekhar in Chicago.