Today’s (Oct. 19) Google Doodle honors Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the late Nobel Peace Prize winner who founded the Chandrasekhar Limit — which determines the maximum and threshold mass of a stable white dwarf star — on what would be his 107th birthday.
The Chandrasekhar Limit, according to a PBS report, “is the difference between dying in a blaze of glory and going out in a slow fade to black. For our universe, this line means much more: Only by exceeding it can stars sow the seeds of life throughout the cosmos.”
In the Google Doodle, a cartoon Chandrasekhar is seen plucking a star out of the sky, which is also acting as the first ‘O’ in Google, and placing it on a balance scale with a mass worth ‘1.44’ — referring to the equation for the Chandrasekhar Limit (1.4x the mass of the sun).
Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930. He was a child prodigy — born in India and emigrated to the United States in 1937. You can learn more about him here.