Namers of orbiting telescope to receive Chandra mementos

An academic heirloom once owned by the late Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar is about to find a new home, as will a reprint of Chandra’s first scientific publication that he had apparently intended to send to a distinguished German scientist.

The items will be given to the co-winners of the contest to name NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory as thank-you gifts from the University of Chicago, where Chandra spent most of his long and fruitful scientific career. NASA named the observatory after Chandra last December.The Chandra Observatory is scheduled for launch aboard space shuttle Columbia at 12:36 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 20 (11:30 p.m. CDT Monday, July 19) from Kennedy Space Center, Fla.

Mrs. Lalitha Chandrasekhar will present the mementos to the contest winners, Tyrel Johnson of Laclede, Idaho, and Jatila van der Veen of Ventura, Calif., on behalf of the University during a prelaunch event July 19 at Kennedy Space Center, Fla. But first, Mrs. Chandra will make a surprise presentation of her own.

The contest to name the Chandra Observatory, formerly called the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility, drew more than 6,000 entries from 50 states and 61 countries. The contest prize, a trip to the Kennedy Space Center to view the launch of the Chandra Observatory, was donated by TRW, NASA’s prime contractor for the observatory.

Johnson, an 11th-grade student at Priest River Lamanna High School in Priest River, Idaho, will receive a volume of mathematical tables once owned by Chandra. Van der Veen, an academic coordinator and lecturer in the physics department at the University of California-Santa Barbara, will receive a reprint of Chandra’s first scientific paper that he apparently had intended to send to a prominent German scientist. Both gifts were provided by Peter Vandervoort, a former student and colleague of Chandra’s at Chicago.

The title of the book is Tables of Integrals and Other Mathematical Data, compiled by Herbert Dwight and published in 1934.

“I have to say that it is a rather battered book at this point,” said Vandervoort, Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics at Chicago. “There are a few places in the tables where Chandra has corrected some of the entries by hand. And if you turn through the pages, occasionally you come to a page where he has inserted additional formulas by hand.”

Chandra signed his name inside the cover. He also wrote the word “Yerkes”––the University of Chicago observatory where he once worked––and a date: “1940, March 9.”

Vandervoort added his own name and “Yerkes 1959” below that, after Chandra gave it to him in Vandervoort’s last year as a graduate student at the University.

“It’s a small volume that one would have on one’s desk or near at hand if one is doing applied mathematics, tabulating functions or things of that sort,” he said. “Tyrel could do much worse than carry it off to college and use it as he studies calculus.”

The other gift is a reprint of Chandra’s first paper, “Thermodynamics of the Compton Effect with Reference to the Interior of Stars,” published Oct. 15, 1928, in the Indian Journal of Physics. Vandervoort found the paper in a trash can at Yerkes Observatory years ago. Recognizing its potential connection between Chandra and another distinguished 20th-century scientist, he saved it.

“It has to do with the scattering of electrons and photons in the interior of a star,” said Michael Turner, the Bruce and Diana Rauner Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman of Astronomy & Astrophysics at Chicago. “Anyway, it has a bit of a mystery associated with it.”

Written on the front are the words: “Professor A. Sommerfeld.”

“Apparently, Chandra was going to give this to Professor Arnold Sommerfeld, but it never reached him. He was one of the founders of quantum mechanics, a very distinguished German scientist.”

According to Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar by Syracuse University’s Kameshwar Wali, Sommerfeld met with Chandra in Madras during a visit to India in fall 1928. Chandra told Sommerfeld that he had read the English edition of the latter’s Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines. Sommerfeld told Chandra of the revolution then taking place in quantum mechanics––the physics of atomic structure and the behavior of subatomic particles––and he gave Chandra a copy of the paper he would soon publish on the electron theory of metals.

“That paper was Chandra’s introduction to the new quantum statistics, and it was Chandra’s first step on the road to the discovery of the mass limit for white dwarfs,” Vandervoort said. As an established senior scientist taking an interest in a young person and giving encouragement, Sommerfeld may have helped set an example for Chandra.

Said Vandervoort, “Chandra was the senior figure in many similar situations in the years that followed.”