S. CHANDRASEKHAR, 84
NOBEL-WINNING ASTROPHYSICIST
Author: Associated Press
Date: Wednesday, August 23, 1995
Page: 41
Section: OBITUARY
CHICAGO -- Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who won the Nobel Prize in physics
for a theory he developed at an age when most people haven't even picked a
college major, died Monday of a heart attack. He was 84.
Mr. Chandrasekhar, a native of Lahore, India, joined the University of
Chicago in 1937 and was a professor emeritus at his death.
He was 19 and preparing for postgraduate study at Cambridge University in
Britain when he developed his theory about stars. It challenged the notion
common in the 1930s that all stars, after burning up their fuel, become faint
planet-size remnants known as white dwarfs.
He theorized that stars with a mass greater than 1.4 times that of the sun
-- now known as the "Chandrasekhar mass" -- must eventually collapse into an
object of enormous density.
The black holes and extremely dense neutron stars implied by his early work
have become a central part of the field of astrophysics.
He won the Nobel Prize in 1983, 53 years after first developing the theory,
sharing the award with William Fowler of the California Institute of
Technology.
"Chandra was one of the great astrophysicists of our time," said Cornell
University physicist Hans Bethe, a fellow Nobel laureate.
His uncle, C.V. Raman, was also a Nobel Prize winner in physics.
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