Chandrasekhar limit
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The
Chandrasekhar limit /tʃʌndrəˈʃeɪkɑr/ is the maximum mass of a
stable white dwarf star. The limit was first published by
Wilhelm Anderson and
E. C. Stoner, and was named after
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Indian-American
astrophysicist who improved upon the accuracy of the calculation in 1930, at the age of 19. This limit was initially ignored by the community of scientists because such a limit would logically require the existence of black holes, which were considered a scientific impossibility at the time. White dwarfs, unlike
main sequence stars, resist
gravitational collapse primarily through
electron degeneracy pressure, rather than
thermal pressure. The Chandrasekhar limit is the mass above which electron degeneracy pressure in the star's core is insufficient to balance the star's own gravitational self-attraction. Consequently, white dwarfs with masses greater than the limit undergo further gravitational collapse,
evolving into a different type of
stellar remnant, such as a
neutron star or
black hole. Those with masses under the limit remain stable as white dwarfs.
[1]
The currently accepted value of the limit is about 1.39 *mass of sun ( 2.765 × 1030 kg)
