 "When a star ‘dies’, matter is recycled")
In July 1930, a 19-year-old from Madras (now Chennai) boarded a ship, heading for Trinity College, Cambridge. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who was born on October 19, 1910, was the son of C V Raman’s brother, and reckoned a physics prodigy. He had already graduated.
His metier was astrophysics. On that journey, he came to some conclusions about the ways in which stars "lived" and "died". He would eventually win the Nobel prize for the calculations initiated while on that voyage.
The latest news from the cutting edge of astrophysics confirms some of his theories. The LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) witnessed an epochal
