Subrahmanyan chandrasekhar nobel prize

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Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

The Man Behind The Name

Chandra in his early years
(Photo: AIP)

Chandra in his middle years
(Photo: AIP)

NASA's premier X-ray observatory was named the Chandra X-ray Observatory in honor of the late Indian-American Nobel laureate, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (pronounced: su/bra/mon'/yon chandra/say/kar). Known to the world as Chandra (which means "moon" or "luminous" in Sanskrit), he was widely regarded as one of the foremost astrophysicists of the twentieth century.

Chandra immigrated in 1937 from India to the United States, where he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, a position he remained at until his death. He and his wife became American citizens in 1953.

Chandra in his later years
(Photo: Univ. of Chicago)

Trained as a physicist at Presidency College, in Madras, India and at the University of Cambridge, in England, he was one of the first scientists to combine the disciplines of physics and astronomy. Early in his career he demonstrated that there is an upper limit — now called the Chandrasekhar limi

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Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar—child prodigy, predictor of black holes, Nobelist, and UChicago professor for nearly 60 years—often distilled his life into two sentences: “I left India and went to England in 1930. I returned to India in 1936 and married a girl who had been waiting for six years, came to Chicago, and lived happily thereafter.”

Chandrasekhar is best known for the earliest part of his career, when he determined the fate of massive stars and was betrayed by a mentor. Yet he spent the next six decades making equally influential breakthroughs in stellar structure and dynamics, and training a new generation of astrophysicists. He also faced discrimination and alienation, elided from the fairy-tale ending he liked to recount.

Chandra, as he was known, was born in 1910 in Lahore—then British India, now Pakistan—the third of 10 children. In Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar (University of Chicago Press, 1990) his biographer Kameshwar C. Wali, a UChicago physicist in the late ’60s, describes him as a mischievous child with an early aptitude for math.

Chandra didn

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Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Very Interesting!

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was known to the world as Chandra. The word chandra means "moon" or "luminous" in Sanskrit.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born in 1910 in Lahore, which at the time was in British India. He was one of ten children born to Sita Balakrishnan and Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyar. His father was a government officer while his mother was a highly intellectual woman that translated literary works into Tamil, an Indian dialect. His parents and private tutors schooled Chandra at home until the age of twelve. He attended Hindu High School where he graduated in 1925 at the age of fifteen. He earned a bachelors degree in physics from Presidency College. Chandra received a scholarship to pursue graduate studies at Cambridge University in England. He also studied for one year in Copenhagen at the Institut for Teoretisk Fysik prior to receiving his Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1933. In 1936 Chandra was joined with Lalitha Doriswamy in a marriage that lasted for over fifty years. In 1937 Chandra joined the faculty