the limit? Would it collapse to infinite density? Eddington was shocked by that implication, and he refused to believe ChandrasekharΓÇÖs result. Eddington thought it was simply not possible that a star could collapse to a point. This was the view of most scientists: Einstein himself wrote a paper in which he claimed that stars would not shrink to zero size. The hostility of other scientists, particularly Eddington, his former teacher and the leading authority on the structure of stars, persuaded Chandrasekhar to abandon this line of work and turn instead to other problems in astronomy, such as the motion of star clusters. However, when he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1983, it was, at least in part, for his early work on the limiting mass of cold stars.
