Elon Musk reveals his son's middle name is after Nobel-winning astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar—who was he?

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that his partner Shivon Zilis is “half-Indian” and that one of their children’s middle name is ‘Sekhar', chosen in honour of Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

“One of my sons with her is, his middle name is Sekhar, after Chandrasekhar,” Musk said during an interview with investor and entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath on his show People by WTF.

When asked whether Zilis had spent any time in India, Musk explained that she was given up for adoption as a baby and raised in Canada. "I think her father was like an exchange student at the university, or something like that. I'm not sure of the exact details, but, just kind of thing where I don't know... she was given up for adoption,” he said.

Musk and Zilis have four children together: twins Strider and Azure, a daughter Arcadia, and a son Seldon Lycurgus. Zilis works as a director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, one of Musk’s companies.

Who was Nobel-winning astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar?

Born in Lahore on 19 October 1910, S. Chandrasekhar was a prominent Indian-American astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 “for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars".

He was the nephew of CV Raman, the 1930 Nobel Prize winner in Physics.

His mathematical analysis of stellar evolution provided the foundation for many modern theoretical models of the later stages of massive stars and black holes. Numerous concepts, institutions, and inventions bear his name, including the Chandrasekhar limit and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Chandrasekhar pursued his education at Presidency College in Madras and at the University of Cambridge. He spent much of his academic career as a professor at the University of Chicago, conducted research at the Yerkes Observatory, and served as editor of The Astrophysical Journal from 1952 to 1971.

In September 1936, he married Lalitha Doraiswamy, whom he had met as a fellow student at Presidency College. He became a naturalised US citizen in 1953. Chandrasekhar passed away from a heart attack at the University of Chicago Hospital in 1995, having previously survived another heart attack in 1975. His wife outlived him and passed away on 2 September 2013, at the age of 102.

(With inputs from PTI)