Giants in History: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (19 October 1910 – 21 August 1995) was an Indian astrophysicist who studied the structure and evolution of stars. Chandrasekhar showed that the mass of a white dwarf star could not exceed 1.4 times that of the sun, otherwise they would explode or form black holes when they died – a metric named the Chandrasekhar limit. For this discovery, Chandrasekhar, along with William A. Fowler, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983. A dedicated mentor who cared for the personal and intellectual well-being of his students, Chandrasekhar taught courses at the University of Chicago while he was working at the Yerkes Observatory.