biography
| name: |
Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan
|
pronunciation:
[chandrasayker]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1910–95)
|
| biography:
| Astrophysicist, born in Lahore, Pakistan (formerly India). As a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University (1933–7), he developed his theory of white dwarfs, ‘collapsed’ stars of enormous density, such that their mass does not exceed 1·4 times the mass of the Sun, known as the Chandrasekhar limit. Since such a small, dense body allows no radiation to escape, his theory predicted the existence of what are now known as ‘black holes’. When his ideas were publicly derided by the respected English physicist Arthur Eddington, the distraught Chandrasekhar emigrated to the University of Chicago (1937), and remained there until his retirement (1980). His theory was vindicated, and he continued his research on relativistic astrophysics, winning the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for his contribution to knowledge of evolution of the stars. |
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