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clumps tim
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dear friends, can I get a link to the original paper by Chandrashekhar where he derived the limit for white dwarf? also you can suggest me other good papers deriving the limit.
regards
regards
clumps tim said:dear friends, can I get a link to the original paper by Chandrashekhar where he derived the limit for white dwarf? also you can suggest me other good papers deriving the limit.
regards
The Chandrashekhar paper on white dwarf is a groundbreaking scientific paper published by Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrashekhar in 1931. It proposed the theory of white dwarf stars and explained their formation and properties.
The Chandrashekhar paper was significant because it challenged the widely accepted belief at the time that all stars eventually collapse into a state of infinite density called a "singularity." Chandrashekhar's theory showed that there is a limit to how massive a white dwarf star can be, known as the Chandrashekhar limit.
A white dwarf star is a small, dense star that is the final stage in the life cycle of most stars, including our own sun. It is made up of the leftover material from a star's core after it has burned through all of its fuel and shed its outer layers.
Chandrashekhar was studying at Cambridge University when he became interested in the behavior of stars. He studied the equations of stellar structure and used them to predict how a star would behave at different stages of its life cycle. His calculations showed that stars with a mass greater than 1.4 times that of the sun would not be able to support their own weight and would collapse into a white dwarf.
Yes, Chandrashekhar's theory has been proven through various astronomical observations and experiments. For example, in 1967, astronomers discovered a white dwarf star with a mass of 1.44 times that of the sun, exactly at the Chandrashekhar limit. This provided strong evidence for the validity of his theory. Today, the Chandrashekhar limit is an important concept in astrophysics and is used to understand the behavior of white dwarf stars and other objects in the universe.