Meet Rohan Naidu: Hyderabad-born, an engineering dropout & now the astronomer behind a ‘black hole star’ study
Naidu is the lead author of a study published in Nature that examines MoM-BH-1*, an extraordinarily bright red object observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
- Aug 18, 2026,
- Updated Aug 18, 2026 4:19 PM IST
At 18, Rohan Naidu dropped out of engineering school in India. Today, the Hyderabad-born astronomer is leading research into one of the most unusual objects spotted in the early universe — a mysterious red source that could be a previously unknown type of cosmic object known as a “black hole star”, according to a report by The Economic Times.
Naidu is the lead author of a study published in Nature that examines MoM-BH-1*, an extraordinarily bright red object observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The object appears to be roughly the size of our solar system but is estimated to be about 100 billion times brighter than an ordinary star.
The researchers believe its enormous energy output could come from a black hole surrounded by a vast envelope of dense hydrogen.
For Naidu, the discovery is another step in a career that began far away from the conventional path into astronomy.
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From Hyderabad to Yale-NUS
Naidu grew up in Hyderabad, India. According to his MIT biography, he left engineering school at the age of 18.
What followed was a decision his MIT profile describes as a “Bollywood-esque plot twist”. Naidu bought his first-ever plane ticket and joined the founding class of 150 students at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.
It was there that his interest in astronomy began to take shape.
Naidu first explored the field by studying blazars in the Chilean Andes with Professor Charles Bailyn. He also spent time as an exchange student working with Dr Iva Momcheva and Professor Pascal Oesch in the van Dokkum group at Yale.
He later moved to Harvard, where he pursued a PhD under Professor Charlie Conroy.
Studying the ancient Milky Way
Naidu’s early research took him deep into the history of our own galaxy.
During his doctoral research, he studied the farthest reaches of the Milky Way as part of the H3 Survey. The work focused on ancient galaxies that had been absorbed into the Milky Way over cosmic history.
His research has since increasingly turned towards the early universe, where he studies some of the first galaxies and objects to emerge after the Big Bang.
Today, Naidu is a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
His work broadly focuses on understanding when the first galaxies formed, how they contributed to the reionisation of hydrogen between galaxies and how they produced the elements that eventually became the building blocks of life.
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Looking back to the early universe
Naidu approaches the history of the universe from two directions.
Using JWST, he studies extremely distant galaxies directly, allowing astronomers to look back towards the earliest stages of cosmic history.
He also uses data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite to study the Milky Way’s ancient history and investigate some of the oldest stellar systems that eventually became part of our galaxy.
That combination of studying the distant universe and the ancient history preserved within the Milky Way has become central to his research.
The strange object that caught his attention
That work brought Naidu and his collaborators to MoM-BH-1*, an object identified through the Mirage or Miracle (MoM) survey, which searches for some of the earliest and most distant galaxies.
When the team examined JWST observations, they found something that did not look quite right.
The source was unusually red and exceptionally bright. Its brightness, colour and spectral characteristics raised questions about whether it was actually a conventional galaxy or star.
“Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly,” Naidu was quoted as saying in MIT News.
The researchers eventually began considering a more unusual possibility: a black hole surrounded by a huge envelope of gas.
“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,” Naidu said.
A ‘black hole star’ 100 billion times brighter than an ordinary star
The object’s extraordinary brightness is one of the reasons it has attracted so much attention.
Researchers estimate that MoM-BH-1* is around 100 billion times brighter than an ordinary star — far too bright to be explained by the nuclear fusion that powers stars such as the Sun.
“You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,” Naidu said.
“That means you can't be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars we have,” he added.
Instead, the team believes an actively feeding black hole could be responsible for the enormous energy output.
Their simulations suggest that a black hole around 100,000 times the mass of the Sun could sit at the centre of an extremely dense hydrogen envelope. The envelope could extend to roughly the size of our solar system, making the object appear more like a giant star.
The clues hidden in its light
The object also showed an unusually deep Balmer break, a feature associated with dense gas absorbing certain wavelengths of light.
“The break we observed in this object is the deepest break we have ever observed in any object, ruling out 'ordinary' stars as the source,” Naidu said.
Its chemical composition was equally unusual. The light contained almost no clear signatures of metals or elements other than hydrogen and helium.
“It was truly singular in so many ways,” Naidu said.
The researchers then tested whether an extremely dense layer of hydrogen could reproduce what JWST had observed.
“We started to ask: Could you make something that red using just hydrogen, without any dust?” Robert Simcoe, director of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, was quoted as saying in MIT News.
“To our surprise, it turns out you can, if you have an extremely dense screen of hydrogen, so dense that it looks more like the surface of an enormous star than a wispy interstellar nebula,” he added.
When the researchers introduced an accreting black hole into their models, the resulting simulations provided the closest match to the JWST observations.
Could Naidu’s discovery explain the ‘little red dots’?
The research could have implications beyond a single object.
JWST has detected numerous compact objects known as “little red dots” in the early universe. Their nature remains one of the major unresolved questions of the JWST era.
“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,” he added.
The researchers suggest that black hole stars could potentially explain at least some of these mysterious objects.
“Every little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy,” Naidu said.
MoM-BH-1*, however, appears to be particularly unusual because its brightness overwhelms that of its surrounding host galaxy.
“But what is special about MoM-BH-1 is, the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we're seeing pure black hole star light,” Naidu said.
A career built around the earliest universe
The possible discovery of a “black hole star” brings Naidu’s career back to the question that has shaped much of his work: what did the universe look like when its first galaxies and stars were taking shape?
From leaving engineering school in Hyderabad at 18 to studying some of the most distant objects visible to humanity, Naidu has taken an unconventional route into one of astronomy’s most challenging areas.
His work now sits at the intersection of two timelines — the ancient history of the Milky Way and the earliest stages of the universe — with JWST offering a new window into both.
At 18, Rohan Naidu dropped out of engineering school in India. Today, the Hyderabad-born astronomer is leading research into one of the most unusual objects spotted in the early universe — a mysterious red source that could be a previously unknown type of cosmic object known as a “black hole star”, according to a report by The Economic Times.
Naidu is the lead author of a study published in Nature that examines MoM-BH-1*, an extraordinarily bright red object observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The object appears to be roughly the size of our solar system but is estimated to be about 100 billion times brighter than an ordinary star.
The researchers believe its enormous energy output could come from a black hole surrounded by a vast envelope of dense hydrogen.
For Naidu, the discovery is another step in a career that began far away from the conventional path into astronomy.
Don't Miss: Su-30MKI, warships and missiles: India adds 405 items to defence indigenisation list
From Hyderabad to Yale-NUS
Naidu grew up in Hyderabad, India. According to his MIT biography, he left engineering school at the age of 18.
What followed was a decision his MIT profile describes as a “Bollywood-esque plot twist”. Naidu bought his first-ever plane ticket and joined the founding class of 150 students at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.
It was there that his interest in astronomy began to take shape.
Naidu first explored the field by studying blazars in the Chilean Andes with Professor Charles Bailyn. He also spent time as an exchange student working with Dr Iva Momcheva and Professor Pascal Oesch in the van Dokkum group at Yale.
He later moved to Harvard, where he pursued a PhD under Professor Charlie Conroy.
Studying the ancient Milky Way
Naidu’s early research took him deep into the history of our own galaxy.
During his doctoral research, he studied the farthest reaches of the Milky Way as part of the H3 Survey. The work focused on ancient galaxies that had been absorbed into the Milky Way over cosmic history.
His research has since increasingly turned towards the early universe, where he studies some of the first galaxies and objects to emerge after the Big Bang.
Today, Naidu is a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
His work broadly focuses on understanding when the first galaxies formed, how they contributed to the reionisation of hydrogen between galaxies and how they produced the elements that eventually became the building blocks of life.
Must Read: Think India is the tea capital? China dominates global tea production. Here’s who comes next
Looking back to the early universe
Naidu approaches the history of the universe from two directions.
Using JWST, he studies extremely distant galaxies directly, allowing astronomers to look back towards the earliest stages of cosmic history.
He also uses data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite to study the Milky Way’s ancient history and investigate some of the oldest stellar systems that eventually became part of our galaxy.
That combination of studying the distant universe and the ancient history preserved within the Milky Way has become central to his research.
The strange object that caught his attention
That work brought Naidu and his collaborators to MoM-BH-1*, an object identified through the Mirage or Miracle (MoM) survey, which searches for some of the earliest and most distant galaxies.
When the team examined JWST observations, they found something that did not look quite right.
The source was unusually red and exceptionally bright. Its brightness, colour and spectral characteristics raised questions about whether it was actually a conventional galaxy or star.
“Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly,” Naidu was quoted as saying in MIT News.
The researchers eventually began considering a more unusual possibility: a black hole surrounded by a huge envelope of gas.
“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,” Naidu said.
A ‘black hole star’ 100 billion times brighter than an ordinary star
The object’s extraordinary brightness is one of the reasons it has attracted so much attention.
Researchers estimate that MoM-BH-1* is around 100 billion times brighter than an ordinary star — far too bright to be explained by the nuclear fusion that powers stars such as the Sun.
“You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,” Naidu said.
“That means you can't be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars we have,” he added.
Instead, the team believes an actively feeding black hole could be responsible for the enormous energy output.
Their simulations suggest that a black hole around 100,000 times the mass of the Sun could sit at the centre of an extremely dense hydrogen envelope. The envelope could extend to roughly the size of our solar system, making the object appear more like a giant star.
The clues hidden in its light
The object also showed an unusually deep Balmer break, a feature associated with dense gas absorbing certain wavelengths of light.
“The break we observed in this object is the deepest break we have ever observed in any object, ruling out 'ordinary' stars as the source,” Naidu said.
Its chemical composition was equally unusual. The light contained almost no clear signatures of metals or elements other than hydrogen and helium.
“It was truly singular in so many ways,” Naidu said.
The researchers then tested whether an extremely dense layer of hydrogen could reproduce what JWST had observed.
“We started to ask: Could you make something that red using just hydrogen, without any dust?” Robert Simcoe, director of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, was quoted as saying in MIT News.
“To our surprise, it turns out you can, if you have an extremely dense screen of hydrogen, so dense that it looks more like the surface of an enormous star than a wispy interstellar nebula,” he added.
When the researchers introduced an accreting black hole into their models, the resulting simulations provided the closest match to the JWST observations.
Could Naidu’s discovery explain the ‘little red dots’?
The research could have implications beyond a single object.
JWST has detected numerous compact objects known as “little red dots” in the early universe. Their nature remains one of the major unresolved questions of the JWST era.
“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,” he added.
The researchers suggest that black hole stars could potentially explain at least some of these mysterious objects.
“Every little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy,” Naidu said.
MoM-BH-1*, however, appears to be particularly unusual because its brightness overwhelms that of its surrounding host galaxy.
“But what is special about MoM-BH-1 is, the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we're seeing pure black hole star light,” Naidu said.
A career built around the earliest universe
The possible discovery of a “black hole star” brings Naidu’s career back to the question that has shaped much of his work: what did the universe look like when its first galaxies and stars were taking shape?
From leaving engineering school in Hyderabad at 18 to studying some of the most distant objects visible to humanity, Naidu has taken an unconventional route into one of astronomy’s most challenging areas.
His work now sits at the intersection of two timelines — the ancient history of the Milky Way and the earliest stages of the universe — with JWST offering a new window into both.