Born #onthisday 114 years ago, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian-American astrophysicist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics (along with William A. Fowler) for the "...theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars" [1].
Chandrasekhar's amazing discovery of the limit for the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star [2] is known as the Chandrasekhar Limit. The currently accepted value of the Chandrasekhar Limit is about 1.4 M☉ (solar masses), or about 2.765 × 10^30 kg [3].
Learn more about Chandrasekhar and the Chandrasekhar Limit here https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/the-chandrasekhar-limit-the-threshold-that-makes-life-possible/ and here https://galileo-unbound.blog/2019/01/07/chandrasekhars-limit.
References
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[1] "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1983", https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1983/summary/
[2] "The Maximum Mass of Ideal White Dwarfs", https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1931ApJ....74...81C
[3] "Chandrasekhar limit", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chandrasekhar_limit
