Watching Black Hole Being Born

For decades, astronomers have known that almost every galaxy — including our own — has a supermassive black hole at its heart, sometimes a million times heavier than the Sun. What no one could explain was how something so enormous ever formed in the first place.

Hyderabad-born Rohan Naidu, 32, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Hawai’i, may have just found the answer. He has spent the last two years on how does a black hole end up at the centre of a galaxy?

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, Naidu and his team may have caught a black hole being born, still cocooned in glowing gas and growing at extraordinary speed. “That is something we’ve never seen before and that helps explain this mystery,” he says.

It is, in his words, only a first step. But the implications go far beyond black holes.

“Understanding where they came from, at what time in the universe did they form, how big they were lets us understand when a star like the Sun may have formed,” he explains — which, in turn, is the story of how planets and eventually life, ever got a chance to exist.

None of this was on the horizon for a boy growing up in Hyderabad. His parents were both lecturers and by his own account, he was a model student pushed through the city’s famous extra-coaching pipeline. Weekends were for quizzing at K-Circle, not stargazing.

He joined IIIT-Hyderabad for computer science but dropped out a year later to join the inaugural batch of Yale-NUS College — a move his mother initially mistook for a painting course.

There, almost by accident, he sat in on a professor’s seminar on black holes. A summer internship in Chile’s Atacama Desert followed — his first real look at a night sky untouched by city glow.

From Singapore he went to Harvard for a PhD, then to MIT as a postdoctoral fellow, and now to Hawai’i, where he holds a professorship and access to some of the world’s largest telescopes. Asked what he would tell a young person torn between the safe path and the one that actually excites them, he doesn’t hesitate: “Whenever given the choice between doing something safe and obvious and what everybody advises you to do... I always tried to really listen to my heart and figure out what is it that really gave me happiness.”

Box: He still quizzes with old schoolmates, checks on baby white tern chicks in Hawaii and fondly recalls watching Mahesh Babu’s Okkadu growing up.