Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for a calculation he made as a young man on a long sea voyage: there is a maximum mass a white dwarf star can support against its own gravity. Above roughly 1.4 times the mass of the Sun — the Chandrasekhar limit — the star can no longer hold itself up and collapses.
The idea was met with fierce resistance at first, including from leading astronomers of the day. But it proved exactly right, and it underpins our modern understanding of how stars die, giving rise to neutron stars, supernovae and black holes.
His broader work brought mathematical rigour to astrophysics across a remarkably long career, from stellar structure to the theory of black holes.
Why it matters: The Chandrasekhar limit tells us which stars fade quietly and which die in catastrophe — a single number at the heart of how the universe recycles matter.
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