Google on Thursday marked astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s 107th birth anniversary with a doodle. He is known for his theories on the evolution of stars, which won him a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983.
“Today we honor the original starman whose universal theories propel current space research and modern astronomy on their ambitious missions,” Google said on its doodle celebrating the astrophysicist of Indian origin.
The Chandrasekhar Limit – the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star – is named after him. In 1979, Nasa had named the third of its four “Great Observatories” satellites – the Chandra X-ray Observatory – after the Nobel laureate.
Born in Lahore in present day Pakistan, Chandrasekhar graduated from the Presidency College in Chennai, then Madras, and then pursued higher studies at the University of Cambridge. He worked on a variety of subjects, including the mathematical theory of black holes and the theory of colliding gravitational waves.
Chandrasekhar spent most of his life at the University of Chicago, where he was a professor from 1934 to 1995 before dying of a heart attack at 84. He is the nephew of scientist CV Raman, who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for his work in the field of light scattering.
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