Born in Lahore (now in Pakistan) on a fancy numbered date-19-10-1910, Subramanya Chandrasekhar the third child of orthodox Brahmin couple C.S.Iyer and Sita Balakrishnan went on the lines of his much celebrated uncle, sir C.V.Raman of Raman effect fame, to achieve the highest award in physics, the Nobel prize, making it the second in the clan.
Chandra had his early schooling at home, as his siblings did, before he moved to the Hindu High School in Madras. It was here that the mathematical genius in the boy was starting to show and his measures to the summit were flagged off. After schooling he completed his B.A. (Hon.) in Physics at the Presidency College, Madras and there he also learnt his love lessons from Ms.Lalitha Doraiswamy, the girl who would become Mrs. Chandrasekhar. An Indian govt. Scholarship enabled him pursue his higher education at University of Cambridge and, as a result had the opportunity to interact with the scientific stalwarts of his time like Fowler, Bohr and sir Arthur Eddington.
Following completion of course Chandra tied the knot with Lalitha and a year later in 1937 found a professorship job in the University of Chicago, a place where he would remain the remaining part of his life. Chandra had already taken up to studying stellar formation and scrutinizing white dwarfs while still at Cambridge in fact, even as he was pursuing his undergraduate in Madras. He showed keen interests in the big things around us like stars and black holes which eventually made him come up with the biggest achievement of his lifetime-Chandrasekhar’s limit for the upper limit of mass for a star to end up as a white dwarf-and that which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1983, ultimately after a very long wait. Chandra was little short of satisfaction since; the Nobel committee hadn’t mentioned any of his late works in the citation which upset the genius beyond consolation. But he noted the Nobel Prize as his birthday present.
NASA has felicitated the master by naming one of its observatories after his name as, Chandra X-ray observatory.