Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar's Birthday
Next: October 19, 2027
He worked out how stars die.
The story
Where it comes from
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born in Lahore, then part of British India, on 19 October 1910, and this Story marks his birthday. In 1930, aged 19, on the ship taking him to Cambridge, he worked out that the core a dying star leaves behind can only settle down as a white dwarf if it is less than about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. Heavier cores must collapse further, into neutron stars or black holes, a conclusion now basic to astrophysics. This idea, the Chandrasekhar limit, was among the work honoured when he shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics.
How it's celebrated
There is no organised observance, but his birthday is a good night to look up. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, named in his honour, is a reminder that his ideas still guide astronomers. It is also a day to tell his story to a young stargazer: he spent nearly sixty years at the University of Chicago and guided more than fifty students to their doctorates.
Did you know
- His uncle was C. V. Raman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for discovering the Raman effect.
- His mother, Sita, translated Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House into Tamil.
- NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory got its name from a 1998 contest with more than 6,000 entries from 61 countries; 'Chandra' means 'moon' or 'luminous' in Sanskrit.
Coming up next
- Vietnamese Women's Day · October 20, 2027
- International Chefs Day · October 20, 2027
- Alfred Nobel's Birthday · October 21, 2027
- Apple Day · October 21, 2027
- International Stuttering Awareness Day · October 22, 2027
- International Day of the Snow Leopard · October 23, 2027