The Indian Genius Who Proved Stars Can Die
One 19-year-old formulated the cosmic rule that predicted black holes. For decades, peers mocked him — until he won the Nobel.
In August 1930, a young man from India boarded a ship bound for England, where he would study at Cambridge. During the long voyage, the 19-year-old couldn’t stop thinking about stars. He jotted down his thoughts, formulating that there might be an upper limit to the mass of white dwarfs, or the final stage of certain stars before they die, after which they would no longer be stable.
That idea became the Chandrasekhar limit, now taught in astronomy classes around the world. “[It’s] a fundamental insight into the universe,” said Jon Miller, a scientist who researches black holes. “In that way, the Chandrasekhar limit sits alongside Kepler’s laws, and Newton’s laws, as it should.”
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on stellar structure in 1983 — and taught two students who won Nobels decades before him. Yet, for much of his career, his peers ridiculed or even dismissed his ideas. Nearly a century later, the man behind our modern understanding of black holes might finally be having his moment.