![]() |
| scitechdaily.com |
On a long sea voyage from India to England at the age of 19 in 1930, he worked on it. According to the science of quantum mechanics, white dwarfs are forces within stars that counteract the force of gravity. Chandrasekhar determined that if the star were sufficiently massive, this force would be overwhelmed.
They determined that any star that is 1.4 times more massive than our Sun would be too large to form a stable white dwarf star. After this 1.4-fold limit, the white dwarf collapses due to the force of gravity.
This figure - 1.4 times the mass of our sun - is now known as the "Chandrasekhar limit", and is the key to understanding the evolution of stars in our universe. Beyond this range, at the end of their lives, the stars either explode into a supernova or after exploding turn into a neutron star or a black hole.
So yes we call this limit Chandrasekhar limit. Chandrasekhar was an India-born astrophysicist who spent 50 years at the University of Chicago. Chandra, one of NASA's prized space telescopes
The X-ray Observatory, whose data has brought us beautiful images of many stars exploding as supernovas, is named after him.
This is the Crab Nebula, the result of a supernova explosion 4,500 light-years away from Earth:
![]() |
| forbes.com |


0 Comments
Please do not enter any spam link in the comment box.