Chandrasekhar limit: a standalone construct

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar first derived this bound in 1931, in a short Astrophysical Journal paper on the maximum mass of ideal white dwarfs, and worked it out fully in a 1935 Monthly Notices paper on highly collapsed stellar configurations. The Chandrasekhar limit is the greatest mass a white dwarf, the dense, Earth-sized remnant left when a low-mass star exhausts its fuel, can carry while remaining stable, roughly 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. Below this mass the star is held up by electron degeneracy pressure, a purely quantum resistance that arises because electrons cannot all crowd into the same state, and above it that pressure can no longer balance gravity, so the core collapses. The value follows from fundamental constants alone, the electron mass, Planck's constant, and the gravitational constant, together with the composition of the star, which is what makes it a fixed ceiling rather than a property of any single object. Chandrasekhar received the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for this line of work and restated the result in his 1984 Nobel lecture.[1][2][3]

Unit

A mass threshold, about 1.4 solar masses, above which a white dwarf cannot remain stable

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Derived from the equation of state of a degenerate electron gas and fixed by fundamental constants and stellar composition; checked observationally against measured white dwarf masses and the near-uniform peak brightness of Type Ia supernovae