This Thursday marks the 107th birthday of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar --the first India-born US astrophysicist, which is being celebrated by Google Doodle.
Here's all you need to know about him:
1. Born on 19 October 1910, S. Chandrasekhar, who was popularly known as Chandra, was the one who formulated the theory of white dwarfs. He was the first astrophysicist to win a Nobel Prize for his hypothesis about evolution of stars in which he revealed that all stars won't transform into a white dwarf. This resulted in altering the old theory that was believed by the scientists till 1930s which stated that all stars into white dwarfs which are Earth-sized.
2. He had studied in Presidency College in Madras, after which he studied in Cambridge. In 1936, he shifted to US. When he was just a teenager, he wrote his firs paper which was titled -- Thermodynamics of Compton Scattering with reference to the Interior of Stars.
3. Chandrasekhar found that stars that possess a mass which is more than 1.44 times than our Sun continue contracting throughout their lives. The "1.44 mass" is defined as Chandrasekhar limit which aided in better understanding about the origin of neutron stars and also about what triggers supernova explosions.
4. It was him who pointed towards the existence of black holes, which are an interesting phenomenon present in our universe. The continuous contraction taking place in stars having a mass greater than that of the Sun end up creating supernovas and their further contraction results in formation of black holes.
5. He was also elected as a distinguished service professor of Physics at the Royal Society of London before he even attained the age of 34. He died at the age of 84 on 21 August 1995.
