Descripción
First edition, very rare offprints, documenting the controversy between Eddington and his young colleague Chandrasekhar on the fate of collapsing stars. "In 1930, the Indian physics student Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar obtained a scholarship to continue his studies in the University of Cambridge after graduating from Presidency College in Madras, India. On his long trip to England by ship, he pondered some questions regarding white dwarfs and arrived at an important result [namely] that a star could not become a white dwarf when its mass surpassed a certain limit … Chandrasekhar arrived at Cambridge and presented his results to Ralph Fowler, who sent his paper to Arthur Milne, to ask for his opinion. Both of them were sceptical, because the existence of the limit brought to the forefront a question to which they did not have an answer: what happened to a star whose mass was over the limit? … Eddington was particularly interested in Chandrasekhar's work on white dwarfs, as he thought it could help settle a long-standing dispute between him and Milne about Eddington's model of the stars. Milne had proposed that every star must have a core composed of degenerate material, while Eddington's model considered the entirety of the star to behave like a perfect gas … Chandrasekhar's research implied that a star over the critical mass would act as a perfect gas, which gave Eddington the edge in the argument with Milne. However, Chandrasekhar's conclusion that not all stars would eventually become white dwarfs went directly against Eddington's model … In 1934, he [Chandrasekhar] finished two papers on his theory of white dwarfs in which he had improved the results of his 1931 paper by obtaining an exact solution to the equation of state … He submitted the paper to the Royal Astronomical Society and was invited to present his results during a meeting in January 1935 … Eddington arranged it so that he would present his own paper straight after Chandrasekhar. In it, titled 'Relativistic Degeneracy,' he directly attacked Chandrasekhar's arguments, not on their mathematical correctness, but on their physical meaning … I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way! … Eddington followed up his talk to the Royal Astronomical Society publishing a slightly edited version (On 'relativistic degeneracy', 1935) … Chandrasekhar managed to respond to Eddington's arguments in 1935. In 'Relativistic Degeneracy,' a paper jointly written with Danish physicist Christian Møller, he criticises Eddington's paper saying: 'we [he and Møller] are quite unable to follow [Eddington's] arguments.' Then, they proceed to refute the arguments of his follow-up paper, showing that Eddington's own methods can be used to derive the very same equation that he claimed was the product of a misunderstanding" (MacTutor). "The dilemma that was presented to the scientific world by Chandrasekhar's early work (1931) on the existence of a maximum mass for white dwarf stars took some while to be fully appreciated. There were some, such as Eddington, who did seem to understand the alarming implications of Chandra's conclusions . . . it seemed that a white dwarf star of mass more than about 1.4 of a solar mass would have to collapse inwards, its density increasing indefinitely as the body approached a singular configuration at the centre. However, Eddington regarded this as a reductio ad absurdum . . . Eddington had a point: the impossibility of an equilibrium state would lead . . . to a situation in which [the procedures of conventional physics] would ultimately have to be abandoned" (Penrose, Chandrasekhar, Black Holes, and Singularities, J. Astrophys. & Astron. 17 (1996), 213-232). It is now known that stars with mass above the Chandrasekhar limit but below about 2 solar masses collapse to a neutron star; more massive stars collapse to a black hole. Two offprints, 8vo, pp. [1], 194-206; 673-676. Original printed wrappers. N° de ref. del artículo ABE-1678108388360
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