Chandrasekhar was an Indian-American astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his work explaining how stars and black holes were created. He died in 1995.
The book Tyrel was reading was Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy by Kip Thorne.
One day last year Tyrels science teacher told his class about a contest NASA was having to name the new x-ray telescope that is the main payload on the Space Shuttle Columbia scheduled to launch Tuesday.
Tyrel said Chandrasekhar "just seemed to fit," so he entered the contest and sent in his suggestion, matched by 58 other people including a physics and astronomy teacher from California named Jatila van der Veen.
More than 6,000 other entries from all over the United States and 61 countries arrived with a blizzard of other suggestions.
But NASA agreed with Tyrel and the others who suggested that the new observatory should be named after Chandrasekhar and chose the astrophysicists nicknamed used by his friends: "Chandra," which also means "Moon" or "luminous" in Sanskrit.
Tyrel was the co-winner of the contest along with Jatila van der Veen because, he says, NASA "liked my essay."
Tyrel, who will be a junior in September, said "in third grade I wanted to be an astronaut."
NASA flew him to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to watch some real astronauts and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory -- go up in space.
Would you like to go up with them someday, space.com asked Tyler?
"It would be cool," he said.
advertisement
