In astrophysics, Chandrasekhar's white dwarf equation is an initial value ordinary differential equation introduced by the Indian American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, in his study of the gravitational potential of completely degenerate white dwarf stars. The equation reads as
with initial conditions
where  measures the density of white dwarf,  is the non-dimensional radial distance from the center and  is a constant which is related to the density of the white dwarf at the center. The boundary  of the equation is defined by the condition
such that the range of  becomes . This condition is equivalent to saying that the density vanishes at .