Before S Chandrasekhar won the Nobel in 1983, his theories were overlooked because of his race

The Chandrasekhar-Eddington controversy was once the David vs Goliath battle of the scientific community

The astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar or Chandra, as he was known to many, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 for his contribution to the structure and evolution of stars.

Nephew of the Indian physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, the Lahore-born, Presidency College-educated Chandra first worked out the Chandrasekhar limit during a voyage to Cambridge in 1930, although he had begun this work while still in Madras.

While every high schooler today learns about white dwarfs and black holes, it was then thought that white dwarfs would be the end-of-life for all stars. Realising that Einstein’s relativistic effects would become important at