The Indian physicist who discovered how stars live and die while on a ship voyage [Video]

It was a cosmic conundrum that had left the world’s foremost physicist puzzled, while a leading astronomer’s efforts to help him complicated matters further, but this teenage Indian student, using just pen and paper, devised a solution to the issue while sailing to the UK in 1930 to take up a scholarship to study physics.

The issue was of the life — and death — of stars, and led to the development of the concept of black holes, long before their existence was confirmed by observation. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who would go on to become a prominent theoretical physicist and a Nobel Laureate, was among those involved in determining the fate of the celestial bodies across the universe — when their internal reactions come to a halt.

The issue arose when Albert Einstein formulated his Theory of General Relativity, his geometric construct of the fundamental force of gravitation, refining Isaac Newton’s …