Subramanyam Chandrasekhar, one of the foremost astrophysicists of the twentieth century, was born on October 19th, 1910 to Sita Balakrishnan and Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyar. He was the nephew of the renowned physicist CV Raman. He completed his BSc Physics at Presidency College, Madras in 1930. Chandra went to study in England on a government scholarship and obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from the Cambridge University in 1933. He moved to the University of Chicago in 1937.

He demonstrated that there is an upper limit – now called the Chandrasekhar limit – to the mass of a white dwarf star. A white dwarf is the last stage in the evolution of a star such as the sun. When the nuclear energy source in the center of a star such as the sun is exhausted, it collapses to form a white dwarf. This discovery is basic to much of modern astrophysics, since it shows that stars much more massive than the sun must either explode or form black holes. In 1983, Chandra was awarded the Nobel prize for his theoretical studies of the physical processes important to the structure and evolution of stars.NASA's premier X-ray observatory was named the "Chandra X-ray Observatory" in honour of him. He left the world on August 21 1994 at the University of Chicago Hospitals.