STELLAR: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
While still a student in the 1930s, Chandrasekhar developed a theory that challenged the prevalent notion of the formation of 'white dwarfs.' Most astrophysicists in those times believed that after burning up their fuel, stars collapsed into planet-sized entities that they referred to as white dwarfs. However, through his calculations, Chandrasekhar proposed that only stars equivalent in size to the sun became dwarfs. If the mass of the star were greater than 1.4 times the sun, he claimed, the star would continue to collapse into an object of enormous density. Although he was publicly ridiculed for this -- especially by his idol, the British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington -- his theories form the basis for modern astrophysics: The critical mass he predicted is called the 'Chandrasekhar limit,' and the objects of infinite density are widely referred to as 'black holes.' This work led to his Nobel Prize ...
