Chandrasekhar limit

The Chandrasekhar limit is the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star.^[1] Building on work by others, the Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar worked on the calculation.^[2] He published series of papers between 1931 and 1935.^[3] The Chandrasekhar limit is about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun.^[4]

The Chandrasekhar limit is the mass above which electron degeneracy pressure in the star's core is not enough to balance the star's own gravitational self-attraction.^[5] Then, white dwarfs with masses over the limit would gravitationally collapse into a neutron star or black hole. However, white dwarfs usually explode before they undergo collapse. Those with masses under the limit remain stable as white dwarfs.