Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian-American theoretical astrophysicist whose mathematical formulations brought unparalleled precision to the understanding of stellar structure, radiative transfer, and black holes. The nephew of Nobel laureate C. V. Raman, 'Chandra' showed early mathematical genius at Presidency College, Madras, earning a scholarship to Cambridge University in 1930.

During his voyage aboard the ship to England at age nineteen, Chandra combined special relativity with quantum electron degeneracy pressure and calculated that a dying star exceeding 1.44 solar masses—now known as the Chandrasekhar limit—cannot support itself as a stable white dwarf and must inevitably collapse into a neutron star or black hole. Though initially publicly ridiculed by Arthur Eddington, his calculations were vindicated, earning him the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. Chandra spent nearly sixty years at the University of Chicago and served as managing editor of The Astrophysical Journal. NASA named the Chandra X-ray Observatory in his honor.