Google's adorable Doodle stars Nobel-winning astrophysicist
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his theory on the evolution of stars.
- Shortlisted for British Photography Awards 2022, Commended in Landscape Photographer of the Year 2022
Thursday's Google Doodle celebrates what would have been the 107th birthday of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an Indian astrophysicist famous for his theory on the evolution of stars.
"The Chandrasekhar limit," Google writes, "explains that when a star's mass is lighter than 1.4 times that of the sun, it eventually collapses into a denser stage called a white dwarf. When heavier than 1.4, a white dwarf can continue to collapse and condense, evolving into a black hole or a supernova explosion."
In 1983, he won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Chandrasekhar, who moved to the US to become a University of Chicago professor in the late 1930s, died in Chicago in 1995 at the age of 84.
"Today we honor the original starman whose universal theories propel current space research and modern astronomy on their ambitious missions," Google said.
His birthday Doodle is an adorable animation of a star wishing to be heavier on a set of scales in order to continue down its road of evolution.
The Doodle can be seen in the UK, US and Australia.