Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
File:Chandrasekhar.gif Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Born	19 October1910 Lahore, (India), now Pakistan.
Died	21 August1995 Chicago, Illinois, USA
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Presidency College Cambridge
Known for	Chandrasekhar limit
Awards	File:Nobel.svg Nobel Prize in Physics (1983)
Scientific career
Fields	Physicist
Institutions	Cambridge University of Chicago
Doctoral advisor	R.H. Fowler
Doctoral students	Russell Kulsrud Norman Lebovitz Guido Muench-Paniagua Donald Edward Osterbrock

"Chandrasekhar" redirects here. For the film director, see Jay Chandrasekhar. For the Prime Minister of India, see Chandra Shekhar.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (October 19, 1910, (Lahore, British India, now Pakistan, – August 21, 1995, Chicago, Illinois, United States) was an American astrophysicist born of Tamil heritage in India, who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with William Alfred Fowler) for his theoretical work on the structure and evolution of stars.

Chandrasekhar was the third of ten children born to Sita Ayyar (neé Balakrishnan) and Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyar a senior officer in the British Indian Audits and Accounts Department, and was posted in Lahore as the Deputy Auditor General of the Northwestern Railways. His mother was devoted to intellectual pursuits and had translated Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House into Tamil. His father was an accomplished Carnatic music violinist who had authored several books on musicology. Chandrasekhar was the nephew of Nobel-prize winning physicist C. V. Raman.

He served on the University of Chicago faculty from 1937 until his death in 1995 at the age of 84. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1953.

Early life

Chandrasekhar had most of his school career and his entire college career in Madras (now Chennai), having attended the PS High School and then the Presidency College from which he graduated with a degree in physics. Chandrasekar's family to this date still lives in Madras. He received his doctorate (1933) from, and was also a research fellow at, Trinity College, Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

In addition to mathematics, Chandrasekhar, as a youth, also mastered German, devoured everything from Shakespeare to Hardy, and could read up to 100 pages in an hour "quite easily".

During World War II, Chandrashekhar was called on to work on the top-secret atomic weapons research going on at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, where he collaborated with many prominent physicists including Enrico Fermi.

Nobel prize

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his studies on the physical processes important to the structure and evolution of stars, though he was upset that the citation mentioned only his earliest work, seeing this as a denigration of a lifetime's achievement. It is not certain if the Nobel selection committee was at least remotely influenced in formulating this citation by the early criticisms of Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, another distinguished astrophysicst of his time and a senior to him. His lifetime's achievement may be glimpsed in the footnotes to his Nobel lecture.

Legacy

Chandrasekhar's most famous success was the astrophysical Chandrasekhar limit. The limit describes the maximum mass (~1.44 solar masses) of a white dwarf star, or equivalently, the minimum mass for which a star will ultimately collapse into a neutron star or black hole (following a supernova). The limit was first calculated by Chandrasekhar while on a ship from India to Cambridge, England, where he was to study under the eminent astrophysicist, Sir Ralph Howard Fowler. When Chandrasekhar first proposed his ideas, he was opposed by the British physicist Arthur Eddington, and this may have played a part in his decision to move to the University of Chicago in the United States.

In 1999, NASA named the third of its four "Great Observatories'" after Chandrasekhar. This followed a naming contest which attracted 6,000 entries from fifty states and sixty-one countries. The Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999. The name Chandrasekhar is one of appellations of Shiva meaning "holder of the moon" in Sanskrit and is a common Tamil name.

The asteroid 1958 Chandra is also named after Chandrasekhar.

In 2006, the legendary Detroit electronic music pioneer Gerald Donald, under his Arpanet alias, released a song called "Chandrasekhars Limit". It is on the Inertial Frame LP.

Awards

• Fellow of the Royal Society (1944)
• Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1949)
• Bruce Medal (1952)
• Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1953)
• National Medal of Science award by President Lyndon Johnson (1967)
• Henry Draper Medal (1971)
• Nobel Prize in Physics (1983)
• Copley Medal, the highest honour, of the Royal Society (1984)

References

• Chandrasekhar, S. (1998) [1983]. The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-850370-9.
• Miller, Arthur I. (2005). Empire of the Stars: Friendship, Obsession, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-34151-X.
• Wali, Kameshwar C. (1991). Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-87054-5.

External links

• National Academy of Sciences biography
• Harvard's site on Chandrasekhar
• Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
• Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
• Subramaniam Chandrashekhar
• Bruce Medal page
• Awarding of Bruce Medal: PASP 64 (1952) 55

Obituaries

• BAAS 28 (1996) 1448
• Obs 116 (1996) 121 comment
• PASP 109 (1997) 73
• QJRAS 37 (1996) 261