The Star-Breaker's Limit: A Brief History of the Chandrasekhar Limit

In the grand cosmic theater, where stars are born from dust and die in fire, there exists a line—a precise, unyielding boundary drawn not by a god, but by the fundamental laws of nature. This line dictates the ultimate fate of the stellar actors, separating a quiet retirement from a cataclysmic finale. It is a number, 1.44 times the mass of our own Sun, but it is also a story. It is the story of a young genius on a lonely voyage, a clash of scientific titans, and the conceptual birth of some of the universe's most monstrous and fascinating creations. This is the brief history of the Chandrasekhar Limit, the critical threshold that determines whether a dying star will find peace as a dense, glowing ember, or collapse under its own weight into an abyss of unimaginable violence, seeding the cosmos with the very elements of life. It is the history of how humanity first glimpsed the terrifying and beautiful logic that governs the death of a star.

Before the 20th century, the universe, as understood by Western science, was a place of sublime order. Ever since Isaac Newton, with his newly invented reflecting Telescope and his universal law of gravitation, the cosmos seemed to operate like