  While computing the Fermi degeneracy pressure of electrons in a white dwarf
star within the framework of hydrostatic equilibrium, we depart from the extant
practice of treating the electrons as a free fermion gas, by including the
effect of the star's self-gravity as an effective gravitational potential. By
the star's self gravity, we mean the gravitational field due to the star
itself, resulting from the mass of its constituent atoms, the mass of the atom
being effectively the mass of the proton. Modifying the free particle
Hamiltonian with this effective potential, we employ first order quantum
mechanical perturbation theory to compute the degeneracy pressure, in order to
study the effect of inclusion of this self-gravity of the star on the
Chandrasekhar limiting mass. The final effect is found to be non-trivial, but
perhaps a shade too small to alter any major observational result.
