Hyderabad-born MIT astronomer Rohan Naidu helps uncover a ‘black hole star’

For billions of years, the universe has hidden its strangest secrets in faint, ancient light. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope may have caught one of them: an object from the universe’s infancy that looks like a giant red star, shines with the power of something vastly more luminous than an ordinary star, and may actually be a black hole wearing a cloak of hydrogen.The object, named MoM-BH-1*, could be a previously unknown type of cosmic source, a “black hole star." Scientists believe a black hole roughly 100,000 times the mass of the Sun may be buried inside an enormous envelope of dense hydrogen, creating an object roughly the size of our solar system and an astonishing 100 billion times brighter than an ordinary star.At the centre of this discovery is Rohan Naidu, a Hyderabad-born astronomer and lead author of the study published in Nature.