Who is Rohan Naidu? Hyderabad-born MIT astronomer and Harvard student who led ‘Black Hole Star’ discovery

Hyderabad-born Rohan P. Naidu is among the many astronomers who have discovered the mysterious, strange object in space that they now call 'Black Hole Star.'

Naidu is the lead author of the paper published in the journal Nature on 12 August. The research analyses the latest discovery in space, about 'Little Red Dots', which look like stars but aren't really ones.

“You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,” Naidu said while explaining his discovery.

Astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and elsewhere said in their latest report that they spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe.

The object resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it is also 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 object has been named as MoM-BH*-1. It is believed to be a mashup of a black hole and an enormous star, which has never been seen before and could explain the mysterious "little red dots" often found in deep-space images. An analysis suggests that the red spot is an entirely new type of astrophysical source.

Naidu, who is the lead author of this research report, said, "Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly."

He explained, "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.”

This mysterious red object existed only 660 million years after the Big Bang.

Who is Rohan Naidu?

Rohan Naidu is a NASA Hubble Fellow (2022-2025) and Pappalardo Fellow in Physics (2025-2027) at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI).

According to his profile on the MIT website, Rohan Naidu is interested in the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. He studies the first stars, galaxies, and black holes that formed immediately after the Big Bang.

"I am a regular user of the JWST observatory via several PI and co-I programs. 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," Naidu wrote in his blog.

Born in Hyderabad, India, Rohan dropped out of engineering school at age 18, bought his first-ever plane ticket, and joined the founding class of 150 students at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

He received his PhD in astronomy from Harvard in May 2022.

Naidu is also an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi.

Outside of astronomy, Rohan is a quiz-bowl/trivia enthusiast, published poet, and is always down to watch test cricket.

Story behind Naidu's discovery

An MIT report stated that Naidu and his colleagues didn’t intend to find a black hole star. They were looking for the most distant, earliest galaxies, as part of a survey that they named “Mirage or Miracle” (MoM).

The team used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look into deep space, back when the universe was a few hundred million years old. Their goal was to look for galaxies that actually formed at those early times.

As they looked through the telescope's images for intriguing sources to target with their survey, they noticed a feature that stood out from the rest: "a dot that was very red, and very bright."

The team also observed another strange pattern: The dot’s light was extremely bright, except below certain wavelengths, where the light completely disappeared.

What’s more, the red dot’s light contained almost no signature of metals or any elements other than hydrogen and helium. “It was truly singular in so many ways,” Naidu says.

Researchers then tried to determine the source of the red dot. After much analysis, they concluded that the most likely explanation for the red dot is a 'black hole star'.

"Specifically, the object likely contains a central black hole that is about 100,000 times as massive as the sun. This powerful core is surrounded by a dense, star-like cocoon of hydrogen that is roughly the size of the solar system," the MIT report stated.

The team has named the object MoM-BH*-1 after the survey that detected it as well as the moniker “black hole star – one,” implying that the object is the first of others.