Hyderabad-born astronomer Rohan Naidu left engineering school at 18 before joining Yale-NUS College in Singapore. His journey eventually led him to study the earliest galaxies and black holes in the universe.
At Yale-NUS, Naidu discovered astronomy while researching blazars. He later studied at Harvard, earning a PhD in Astronomy in 2022. His research focused on “Galactic Archaeology” and ancient galaxies absorbed by the Milky Way.
Naidu now studies the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang. His work examines their emergence and influence on the early universe. He has also become an early user of the James Webb Space Telescope.
His research identified MoM-BH-1*, an unusual object observed at a redshift of about 7.76. The object appears to date from when the universe was less than 700 million years old.
The team proposed that it could be a “black hole star,” involving a massive black hole surrounded by extremely dense gas. This interpretation could help explain JWST’s mysterious “little red dots.”
However, the explanation remains a proposal rather than an established classification. Naidu continues researching early-universe galaxies and black holes.
