Subramanyan Chandrasekhar

Subramanyan Chandrasekhar was born on October 19th, 1910, as an eldest of the four sons and the third of the ten children in a Tamil Iyer family.  As his paternal uncle, Nobel Laureate, Sir C.V. Raman, Chandrasekhar was outstanding in studies and was intellectually curious.

Chandra started working on his first scientific paper “The Compton Scattering and the New Statistics” when he was just 15 and his findings was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1928. On the basis of his first scientific paper, Chandra was accepted as a research student by R.H. Fowler at the University of Cambridge.

In the summer of 1933, Chandra was awarded a PhD degree and was also selected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge.

In January 1935, Chandra presented his initial conclusion of the “Chardrasekhar Limit” in the form of a research paper at a meeting of the Astrophysical Society. Though reputed scientists ridiculed him and rejected his finding initially, it was later accepted worldwide.

In the year 1983, Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize for science for his theoretical work on the physical processes of importance to the structure of stars and their evolution. He was 73 years old when he became a Nobel Laureate.

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