Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated the mass limit for white dwarfs at age 19 on a boat to England

Did you know there's a cosmic weight limit for stars?

Imagine a star as a balloon filled with helium. If you keep adding helium, eventually it can't hold it anymore and bursts.

A star can only puff up so much before it can't support itself anymore. It's like a balloon filled with helium; there's a limit to how much it can hold before it pops.

Example

A star with 1.44 times the mass of our Sun is the maximum it can be before it collapses into a neutron star or black hole.

Remember this

The star's maximum mass before collapsing is called the Chandrasekhar limit.

Text adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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