At 18, Rohan Naidu dropped out of engineering school in Hyderabad, India. Today, he’s the astronomer leading one of the most fascinating discoveries to come out of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — a mysterious object that could be a brand-new type of cosmic phenomenon, nicknamed a “black hole star.”
Naidu is the lead author of a study published in the journal Nature, examining an object called MoM-BH-1*. It is an unusually bright, deep-red source spotted in the early universe, roughly the size of our solar system but about 100 billion times brighter than an ordinary star. That kind of brightness rules out normal nuclear fusion as the power source. Instead, Naidu’s team believes a black hole roughly 100,000 times the mass of the Sun sits at its centre, wrapped in an enormous, dense envelope of hydrogen gas — creating something that looks like a giant star from the outside.
Naidu’s path here was not conventional. After leaving engineering school, he bought his first-ever plane ticket and joined the founding class at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where his interest in astronomy took root. He went on to study blazars in the Chilean Andes, worked as an exchange student at Yale, and later earned his PhD at Harvard, researching the ancient history of the Milky Way. He’s now a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
The discovery could help solve a bigger mystery too. JWST has spotted numerous strange, compact objects nicknamed “little red dots” scattered across the early universe, and scientists have long debated what they actually are. Naidu believes many of them could be “black hole stars” just like MoM-BH-1*, though he is careful to note that the picture is “evolving very rapidly” and more observations are needed to confirm it.
From a teenager who once left a conventional career path behind, Naidu now finds himself at the frontier of understanding how the universe’s first black holes and galaxies came to be.
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