Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Samantha Jahn
Early Life and Education
Subrahmayan Chandrasekhar was born in a British Colony of India on October 19, 1910 where he was then Home Schooled throughout his middle school years and then continued his education at Hindu High School (Triplicane, Madras), Presidency College, University of Cambridge in England, and then finished out his doctoral degree at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. Throughout his life he has written ten books including The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes and Newton's Principia for the Common Reader.
Major Contributions
Chandrasekhar was one of the first scientists to combine Physics and Astronomy together, and by doing so he was able to discover that White Dwarf's do have an upper mass limit, this became known as the Chandra Limit, which stated that stars with masses bigger than the sun would explode or become black holes when they die. He also developed several theories on atmospheres, black holes, the illumination of the sunlit sky, star structures and star masses. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with the structure and evolution of stars, and after his death NASA launched a X-Ray Observatory, named in his honor.