On Diwali, when blooming fires of varying hue obscure the stars, Google's Doodle paid tribute to an astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for studying them.

Subrahmanyan Chandrashekhar, an Indian-American scientist, won that honour in 1983, for "his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars." He was born 107 years ago today in Lahore, in British India.

Genius, it seems, ran in Chandrasekhar's family. His uncle was Sir C V Raman, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1928. And his mother - as he himself said* - was "a woman of high intellectual attainments" who translated the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House into Tamil.

Google's Doodle illustrates a theory that Chandrasekhar presented at London's Royal Astrophysical Society before he turned 24. It shows a small cosmic object falling on a weighing scale. The little haloed orb effortlessly outweighs a weight marked '1.44,' which rests on the other side. Like a bowling ball closing its finger holes, it shuts its eyes, and explodes.

What does this mean? A profile of Chandrashekar published by India Today in 1983, the year in which he won the Nobel Prize, contains a description of his theory.

"In a nutshell his (Chandrasekhar's) theory stated that dying stars have a critical mass that is 1.4 times the mass of the sun. Stars whose mass is less than this critical mass, after exhausting all their nuclear fuel, collapse due to gravity into a dense mass called the "white dwarf." But stars heavier than the critical mass simply go on collapsing beyond the dwarf star stage getting denser and denser and smaller and smaller. Such objects are today known as black holes and the critical mass has gone into textbooks as "Chandrasekhar's Limit."

At the time, as the author of the article notes, Sir Arthur Eddington (the very same Eddington who performed that famous test of Einstein's general theory of relativity) thought Chandrasekhar's theory was "outlandish" and "absurd."

But NASA, which named a space observatory after him, says the discovery "is basic to much of modern astrophysics, since it shows that stars much more massive than the Sun must either explode or form black holes."

Chandrasekhar was educated at the Presidency College in Madras, and at the University of Cambridge. He became a US citizen in 1953, and taught at the University of Chicago. He died in 1995.

With a name that alludes to the moon and awards for his work on stars, "Chandra" - said Britain's Astronomer Royal - "probably thought longer and deeper about our universe than anyone since Einstein."

* The quote was taken from a biography published on the Nobel Prize's official website.

WATCH | Black Holes - 60 Second Adventures in Astronomy (Video courtesy: OpenLearn from The Open University/YouTube)