Death of a star
ASTROPHYSICIST Subramanyam Chandrasekhar, 83, died of a heart attack on August 21 in Chicago. Humiliated and laughed at when he presented his theory on dying stars for the first time at the Royai Astronomical Society, London, in 1935, recognition for hisepochal contribution came in the form of a Nobel Prize in 1983. His book titled An introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure is now the standard text and reference book on the subject worldwide.
According to Chandrasekhar, stars with a mass greater than 1.4 times that of the sun eventually collapsed into a black hole from which not even light could escape. The acceptable theory earlier was that stars after burning up their fuel became faint planet-sized remains known as white dwarfs. However, Chandrasekhar proved that there was a limit to the mass of a white dwarf star, now known as the 'Chandrasekhar limit', beyond which a white dwarf star collapses into a black hole.
Hailing from the same family as that of Nobel laureate C V Raman, Chan- drasekhar was born on October 19, 1910 in Lahore. A product of the Presidency College in Madras, Chandrasekhar later studied at Trinity College, London. He joined the University of Chicago in 1938 and was affiliated with.the University till his death.
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