Dr. Soundararajaperumal on the birth, life and death of sun, stars, planets, galaxies, nebulae, plutoids, and other objects!

Astrophysicists seek to understand the universe and our place in it. Dr. Soundararajaperumal explains the whole topic in a very simple terms that any layman can understand.

Subrahmanian Chandrasekhar who lived between 1910-1995 was an astrophysicist. He was born and brought in Triplicane, Chennai. He also finished his schooling from Triplicane and went to receive the nobel prize. Later he spent 50 years at the University of Chicago — and is most famous for coming up with the theory that explains the death of the universe’s most massive stars. Before Chandrasekhar, scientists assumed that all stars collapsed into white dwarfs when they died. He discovered that massive stars can collapse under their own gravity to reach enormous or even infinite densities. Today we call these collapsed stars neutron stars and black holes.

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Chandrasekhar’s working life can be divided into distinct periods, each period usually concluding with a book or monograph on the topic: he studied stellar structure, including the theory of white dwarfs, during the years 1929 to 1939 (summarized in his 1939 book “An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure”); he focussed on stellar dynamics from 1939 to 1943 (his book “Principles of Stellar Dynamics” was published in 1942); he concentrated on the theory of radiative transfer and the quantum theory of the negative ion of hydrogen from 1943 to 1950 (represented by another book, “Radiative Transfer”, published in 1950); he worked on hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability from 1950 to 1961 (his book “Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stability” was published in 1961); he studied the equilibrium and the stability of ellipsoidal figures of equilibrium, and also general relativity, during the 1960s (summarized in the book “Ellipsoidal Figures of Equilibrium” in 1968); during the period 1971 to 1983 he studied the mathematical theory of black holes (as described in his 1983 book “The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes”); and during the late 1980s he worked on the theory of colliding gravitational waves.

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