Imaging black hole like listening to broken piano, scientist Katie Bouman says

WASHINGTON - U.S. computer scientist Katie Bouman, who became a global sensation over her role in generating the world's first image of a black hole, has described the painstaking process as akin to listening to a piano with missing keys. Testifying before Congress on Thursday, the postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics also suggested that the technology developed by the project could have practical applications in the fields of medical imaging, seismic prediction and self-driving cars. A photo released last month of the star-devouring monster in the heart of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy revealed a dark core encircled by a flame-orange halo of white hot plasma. Because M87 is 55 million light-years away, "This ring appears incredibly small on the sky: roughly 40 microarcseconds in size, comparable to the size of an orange on the surface of the moon as viewed from our location on Earth," said Bouman. The laws of physics require a telescope the size of our entire planet to view it.