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Nobel 1983: chemistry and evolution of stars

Nature Reviews Physics volume 5, page 556 (2023)Cite this article

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In fact, Chandrasekhar’s pioneering work on white dwarfs was done during his journey from India to Cambridge in 1930 at the age of 19. He was on his way to pursue graduate studies with Ralph Fowler (unrelated to W. Fowler) who had been applying the new theories of quantum mechanics to white dwarfs. R. Fowler found that, given a certain chemical composition, the density of a white dwarf is proportional to the square of its mass. While working on this idea, Chandrasekhar realized that electrons in the central regions of white dwarf stars might be moving fast enough to make relativistic effects important, and so added special relativity to the theory.

Relativistic effects make the matter in the star more compressible, so that the density becomes greater for a star of a given mass. The star density increases faster than the mass but tends to infinity once the mass reaches a finite value, about 1.4 solar masses, now known as the Chandrasekhar limit. White dwarfs with masses below this limit exist in a stable form, for billions of years, whereas more massive ones explode into a supernova, then collapse under their own weight as their electron degeneracy pressure is not enough to counteract the force of gravity — turning into what we now call a black hole.

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References

Original articles

  • Chandrasekhar, S. The maximum mass of ideal white dwarfs. Astrophys. J. 74, 81 (1931)

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  • Burbidge, E. M., Burbidge, G. R., Fowler, W. A. & Hoyle, F. Synthesis of the elements in stars. Rev. Mod. Phys. 29, 547 (1957)

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  • Hoyle, F. The synthesis of the elements from hydrogen. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 106, 343 (1946)

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  • Hewish, A. et al. Observation of a rapidly pulsating radio source. Nature 217, 709–713 (1968)

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  1. Chief Editor, Communications Physics https://www.nature.com/commsphys/

    Elena Belsole

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  1. Elena Belsole
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Correspondence to Elena Belsole.

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Belsole, E. Nobel 1983: chemistry and evolution of stars. Nat Rev Phys 5, 556 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-023-00653-5

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