In 1999, NASA named the third of its four 'Great Observatories' after Chandrasekhar. This followed a naming contest which attracted 6,000 entries from fifty states and sixty-one countries. The Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999.
Chandrasekhar was the nephew of Nobel-prize winning physicist C. V. Raman.
Chandrasekhar was the nephew of Nobel-prize winning physicist C.
Chandrasekhar had most of his school career and his entire college career in Madras (now Chennai), having attended the PS High School and then the Presidency College from which he graduated with a degree in physics.
The asteroid 1958 Chandra is named after Chandrasekhar, as is the Chandrasekhar limit.
Born in Lahore, India, in 1910, theoretical astrophysicistChandrasekhar was elected to the National Acadamy of Sciences (USA) only two years after he became a US citizen in 1953.
Chandrasekhar was noted for his work in the field of stellar evolution, and in the early 1930s he was the first to theorize that a collapsing massive star would become an object so dense that not even light could escape it.
In addition to his work on star degeneration, Chandrasekhar contributed important theorems on the stability of cosmic masses in the presence of gravitation, rotation, and magnetic fields; this work proved to be crucial for the understanding of the spiral structure of galaxies.
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