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one should take equal to 2 for such a star, leading to the commonly quoted value of . (Near the beginning of the 20th century, there was reason to believe that stars were composed chiefly of heavy elements, so, in his 1931 paper, Chandrasekhar set the average molecular weight per electron, , equal to 2.5, giving a limit of .) Together with William Alfred Fowler, Chandrasekhar received the Nobel Prize for this and other work in 1983. The limiting

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