Chandrasekhar and the Limits of Physics, Part 4: Vindication

The remnant of Tycho's supernova, a Type Ia explosion, in X-ray light. Such blasts happen when a white dwarf reaches the Chandrasekhar limit. Credit: NASA / Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The collapsing stars Eddington swore couldn't exist turned out to be everywhere, and half a century later the world handed Chandrasekhar his Nobel. How the 1.4 solar mass limit became one of the most important numbers in modern astronomy.

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