Today's Google Doodle is dedicated to astrophysicist Subramanian Chandrasekhar, who was the first to study and formulate a mathematical model for the life of stars.
Like a living organism, a star has its own life cycle. It is born from masses of gas and dust, evolves and changes over millions or billions of years, and then dies, leaving behind a stellar remnant of the object it once was. It is a process central to the study of astrophysics, and much of what we know about this cycle comes from the work of today's Google Doodle, Chandrasekhar .
Chandrasekhar, better known as Chandra, was an Indian-born astrophysicist who developed his famous study when he was 20 years old. While studying at Cambridge in England, Chandra formulated the theory now known as the “Chandrasekhar limit,” a concept that describes in detail what happens to stars after they use up all their fuel and die. If a star is less than 1.4 times the mass of our Sun, it will collapse into something called a white dwarf, an extremely hot and dense remnant stellar core. But if a star is more than 1.4 times the mass of our Sun, it will not form a white dwarf, but instead explode in a supernova or collapse into a black hole.
His theory was not the most popular theory at first, and the Chandrasekhar limit was essentially ridiculed by Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the greatest astrophysicists of the time, during a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1935. But ultimately, Chandrasekhar's theory and work would prevail and he would win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. His name Chandra was also given to one of NASA's space telescopes, which observes X-ray emission from the hot parts of the Universe.
Chandra died in 1995, four years before the space telescope was named after him. If he were alive today, he would be 107 years old.
