Hyderabad-born astronomer leads discovery of ‘black hole star’

Rohan P. Naidu, a Hyderabad-born astronomer at MIT, is the lead author of a new study in Nature describing an extraordinary celestial object named MoM-BH*-1. The object, observed by the James Webb Space Telescope, existed just 660 million years after the Big Bang and appears to be a supermassive black hole surrounded by a dense, star-like envelope of gas. It is exceptionally red and bright, emitting 100 billion times more energy than any known star.

Livemint reports that Naidu dropped out of engineering school at 18, bought his first plane ticket, and joined Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He earned a PhD in astronomy from Harvard and is now a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT. The Times of India adds that Naidu is a quiz enthusiast, published poet, and Test cricket fan. The discovery may help explain the mysterious 'little red dots' found in deep-space images and offer clues about how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.