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Einstein published his field equations, the laws of gravity. However, he didn't have an exact answer yet. -
Despite being 41, Karl Schwarzschild was helping calculate German missile trajectories in the 2nd World War. That is, until he came across the Field Equations. -
Karl Schwarzschild found the first solution by imagining the simplest possible universe, with one point of mass, not electrically charged and symmetrically weighted. As you would near the mass, time would slow down. -
After Karl's solution is published, physicists instantly find problems. At the centre of the mass, a mathematical term blows up to infinity, meaning infinite gravity. This is, however, excusable as it is in the centre of the mass. Another problem is that at a certain point - the Schwarzschild radius or event horizon, no light can escape. This creates a black mass that sucks everything in - a black hole, if you will. -
At the time, astronomers were studying what happens as a star's hydrogen runs out. If the hydrogen runs out, there are less nuclear reactions within the star meaning there is nothing resisting the gravity pushing the star to collapse inwards. So it would push, but for how long?
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How long would a star's gravity push inwards? Well, enter physicist Ralph Fowler. Fowler believed that due to Pauli's exclusion principle, two particles cannot occupy the same space. This means that at some point, the particles are enough to resist the gravity. But due to Heisenberg, this meant that as the particles space decreases, their velocity and thus chaos must go up. This creates a white dwarf such as Sirius B -
19-year-old Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was travelling on a voyage to England to study with Arthur Eddington Ralph Fowler. On his journey, he found that even particles had their limits. This is because particles can wiggle faster and faster, but only up to the speed of light. This meant that stars up to a certain weight - the Chandrasekhar limit. However, Eddington was not impressed, publicly blasting Subrahayman saying: "There must be a law of Nature, to stop a star from acting this way." -
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Indeed, as Eddington said, there was a way for stars above the Chandrasekhar limit to support themselves. This is through the combining of electrons and protons to create neutrinos, which are also particles that have an even stronger degeneracy pressure.