Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated, as a young man on the ship from India to England in 1930, the maximum mass a white dwarf star can have before its own gravity overwhelms the pressure holding it up, about 1.44 times the mass of the Sun. Beyond that limit a collapsing star cannot settle into a white dwarf and instead becomes a neutron star or black hole. He shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for this and later work on stellar structure.
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