Meet Rohan Naidu, Hyderabad dropout behind black hole study

Hyderabad: Hyderabad-born astronomer Rohan Naidu, who once dropped out of engineering college to pursue his passion for the cosmos, is at the centre of a discovery that is challenging conventional ideas about how stars and black holes behave.

Late last week, a team of astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) identified a mysterious object that appeared to blur the line between a star and a black hole. Roughly the size of the solar system and enveloped in a cloud of gas, the object emits about 100 billion times more energy than any known star.

Its unusual characteristics have led researchers to describe it as a “black hole star” in a study recently published in Nature.

Who is Rohan Naidu

This Hyderabad lad left engineering school at the age of 18. According to his website, he then purchased his first fight ticket and enrolled in the inaugural class at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

In May 2022, he received his PhD in astronomy from Harvard. He was a Pappalardo Fellow in Physics at MIT from 2025 to 2027 and a NASA Hubble Fellow from 2022 to 2025.

Currently, he works as an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy.

What the team achieved

Naidu and his team, which included researchers from MIT and several other institutions, identified an extraordinarily luminous red object in the early universe. Named MoM-BH1, the object was detected in the constellation Cetus, or the Whale, billions of light-years from Earth. Scientists believe it emerged roughly 660 million years after the Big Bang.