Inside the Puzzling ‘Black Hole Star’ Discovery Reshaping Our View of the Early Universe

Imagine being 18, enrolled in engineering school and expected to follow a fairly predictable path. Then imagine walking away from it. That is what Rohan Naidu did. He left engineering at 18, bought his first-ever plane ticket and joined the founding class of Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Even Naidu's own MIT biography describes the decision as a “Bollywood-esque plot twist.” Today, the Hyderabad-born astronomer studies some of the earliest galaxies and black holes in the universe. And his latest work has taken him to a particularly strange corner of the cosmos — a mysterious object called MoM-BH-1*, which may represent what astronomers are calling a “black hole star.” So, who exactly is Rohan Naidu? From engineering to the stars: Naidu grew up in Hyderabad and initially enrolled in engineering. But engineering wasn't where his curiosity stayed.