Google Doodle celebrates 107th birth anniversary of astrophysicist Chandrasekhar

Today's Google doodle celebrates the 107th birth anniversary of legendary India-origin astrophysicist and Nobel Laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

Chandrasekhar was born on 19 October 1910 in Lahore to a Tamil family. He was described as a child prodigy. At an early age, he decided that he wanted to be a scientist. Chandrasekhar was tutored at home in Mathematics and Physics and went on to pursue a Bachelors degree in Physics from the Presidency College in Madras in 1930. He completed his PhD degree from Cambridge in 1933.

Chandrasekhar won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 "for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars".

Chandrasekhar's most notable work was the astrophysical Chandrasekhar limit. In other words, the limit describes the maximum mass of a white dwarf star, ~1.44 solar masses, or equivalently, the minimum mass which must be exceeded for a star to ultimately collapse into a neutron star or black hole (following a supernova).

Chandrasekhar died of a sudden heart attack at the University of Chicago Hospital in 1995, and was survived by his wife, Lalitha Chandrasekhar, who died on 2 September 2013 at the age of 102.

OneIndia News