Meet Hyderabad-Born Rohan Naidu: From Engineering Dropout to ‘Black Hole Star’ Discovery

Hyderabad-born Rohan P. Naidu is among the astronomers behind the discovery of a mysterious object in space that researchers are calling a “Black Hole Star”.

Naidu is the lead author of a study on MoM-BH-1*, which examines a recent discovery linked to the mysterious “Little Red Dots” — objects that appear similar to stars but are believed to be something different.

Naidu said: “You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter.”

Astronomers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and elsewhere said they had spotted an extremely bright red object in the early universe. The object was studied using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The object is similar in appearance to a gigantic star and is thought to be roughly the size of our solar system. “But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. In fact, such energies are closer to what a black hole might generate,” the report stated.

“The curious combination suggests that the red spot is an entirely new type of astrophysical source. The astronomers are calling it a ‘black hole star’,” it added.

Scientists say that the strange red dot may be a combination of a black hole and a star. “The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole,” the report said.

Naidu said: “Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly.”

“We think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun. And around this black hole, there would be this very extended envelope of gas that looks like a star the size of the solar system. It’s huge,” he added.

If the bright red dot is confirmed to be a black hole star, it could help scientists unravel the mystery surrounding other “Little Red Dots” spotted in almost every deep-space image captured by the JWST so far.

“These little red dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day,” Naidu said. “What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era.”

The object is particularly significant because it existed just 660 million years after the Big Bang.

Naidu and his colleagues’ real intention was not to find a black hole star. Instead, they were looking for the most distant and earliest galaxies as part of their “Mirage or Miracle” survey.

Who is Rohan Naidu?

Rohan Naidu is a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI).

Naidu is also an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi. He studies the first stars, galaxies and black holes that formed immediately after the Big Bang.

Naidu grew up in Hyderabad, India. At the age of 18, he dropped out of engineering school, bought his first-ever flight ticket and joined the founding class of 150 students at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

In a blog post, Naidu said he is a regular user of the JWST observatory through several PI and co-I programmes. “These experiments are uncovering entirely new classes of astrophysical objects such as ‘Little Red Dots’ and ‘Black Hole Stars’ that are reshaping our story of the early Universe,” he wrote.

In 2022, Rohan received his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard University.