Meghnad Saha was born in Seoratali, a village near Dhaka, the capital city of what is now Bangladesh. In 1913 he received a BSc in mixed mathematics from Presidency College at the University of Calcutta, and in 1915 he earned an MSc from the newly established University College of Science and Technology at the University of Calcutta. One of Saha’s classmates during this period was Satyendra Nath Bose, after whom the subatomic particles bosons are named.
Saha’s most famous contribution to science is the Saha ionisation equation, which relates the degree of ionisation of a gas to the temperature, density and ionisation energies of the atoms. This is one of the most important equations in astrophysics, because it describes how the composition and appearance of a stellar spectrum changes with the temperature of the star.
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