NOBEL LAUREATES OF INDIA- Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

 Let’s continue our discovery of the Nobel Laureates of India during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We have seen the Indian Nobel Laureates of the late 18th century, especially in the fields of science. 

Now, we move on to the same in the early 20th century. 

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

    Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born on October 19, 1910, in Lahore. His father, Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Iyer was an officer in the Indian Audits and Accounts Department. His mother Sitalakshmi was a woman of high intellectual attainments. Sir C.V Raman, the first Indian to get Nobel Prize in Science, was his paternal uncle. Till the age of 12, Chandrasekhar had his education at home under his parents and private tutors. In 1992, at the age of 12, he attended the Hindu High School. He joined the Madras Presidency College in 1925. Chandrasekhar passed his Bachelor's degree, BSc (Hon.), in Physics in June 1930. In July 1930, he was awarded a Government of India scholarship for graduate studies in Cambridge, England.

     Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar completed his Ph.D. degree at Cambridge in the summer of 1933. In October 1933, Chandrasekhar was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College for the period 1933-37. In 1936, while on a short visit to Harward University, Chandrasekhar was offered a position as a Research Associate at the University of Chicago and remained there ever since. In September 1936, Chandrasekhar married Lomita Doraiswamy. She was his junior at the Presidency College in Madras. 

     Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar is best known for his discovery of Chandrasekhar Limit. He showed that there is a maximum mass that can be supported against gravity by pressure made up of electrons and atomic nuclei. The value of this limit is about 1.44 times a solar mass. The Chandrasekhar Limit plays a crucial role in understanding stellar evolution. If the mass of a star exceeded this limit, the star would not become a white dwarf. It would continue to collapse under the extreme pressure of gravitational forces. The formulation of the Chandrasekhar Limit led to the discovery of neutron stars and black holes. Depending on the mass there are three possible final stages of a star - white dwarf, neutron star, and black hole.

    Apart from the discovery of the Chandrasekhar Limit, major work done by  Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar includes:

• i) the theory of Brownian motion(1938-1943); 
• ii) theory of the illumination and the polarization of the sunlit sky (1943-1950); 
• iii) the equilibrium and the stability of ellipsoidal figures of equilibrium, partly in collaboration with Norman R. Lebovitz (1961-1971); and
• iv) the mathematical theory of black holes (1974-1983).

     Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was awarded (jointly with the nuclear astrophysicist W.A. Fowler) the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. He died on August 21, 1995.

(Excerpt from SCIENCE INDIA-The National Science Magazine, ISSN 0972-8287)

-> Read on Sir C V Raman - the discoverer of "The Raman Effect"   

-> Read on Indian Nobel Laureate- Dr. HarGovind Khurana

-> Read on Nobel Laureate of India- Sri. Venkataraman Ramakrishnan

-> Read on Nobel Laureate - Sir Ronald Ross 

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