Who is S. Chandrasekhar and why is Google celebrating him today?
What happens to different-sized stars when they run out of energy?
We have a better idea of the answer to that question thanks to late astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who would have turned 107 today.
To honor his birthday, and his contributions to understanding one of the complexities the universe has to offer, Google is celebrating Chandrasekhar with a Google Doodle illustration.
Born in modern day Pakistan in 1910, Chandrasekhar studied physics at the Presidency College in Madras, India, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1930 before completing his PhD studies at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom three years later, according to Al Jazeera.
According to The Verge, the influential scientist came up with a concept that is known today as the Chandrasekhar limit before he even turned 20 as he was traveling to the UK on a boat.
The Chandrasekhar limit lays out what will happen to a star after it runs out of energy.
The crux of his concept is this: A star will become a white dwarf after running out of nuclear fuel if it is less than 1.4 times the mass of our Sun, The Verge explained, but if the star is bigger than that it will become an all-consuming black hole or explosive supernova.
This contradicted conventional thought at the time, as it was assumed that all stars eventually turned into white dwarfs, a small, dense star about the size of a planet, according to Vox.
Chandrasekhar, who moved to the U.S. in 1936, won a Nobel Prize for his study on the life-path of stars in 1983, according to The Hindu.
But the astrophysicist experienced a fair amount of pushback for his revolutionary theory.
In 1935, he explained his concept to scientists at the Royal Astronomical Society, according to The New York Times.
There in the audience was Sir Arthur Eddington, an English astronomer who inspired Chandrasekhar. Chandrasekhar had published a paper about how stars evolve in 1931, according to the Times, but Eddington was highly skeptical about the young scientist’s theory and grilled him about it.
Chandrasekar later said that experience "forced me to carefully consider my reasons for wanting to continue to do astrophysics in the face of such a painful experience,” The Times reported.
He would eventually be vindicated, with the existence of black holes officially proven in 1972 and other studies confirming what he discovered before so many others, according to Al Jazeera.
At just 34, he was elected to the Royal Society of London, according to Time Magazine, eventually earning a gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society.
The Indian-American icon would go on to spend 50 years at the University of Chicago, according to Vox, before dying in 1995 at the age of 84.
Yet even after death, Chandrasekar continues to peer into the vastness of space — NASA has a flagship X-ray observatory named Chandra in his honor, Yahoo reported.
This story was originally published October 19, 2017 at 5:48 AM with the headline "Who is S. Chandrasekhar and why is Google celebrating him today?."