Nice non-specialist summary of recent EHT work! I'm so used to wincing when I click on pop science articles that it was a relief to see a very accurate and yet easy-to-understand article about work I'm involved with.
Our telescope is already as wide as the Earth, so there are two main ways to improve it: one is to launch some satellites, the other is to add more telescopes so that we can see fainter things.
Sgr A* does have a lot of stuff in the way, and it's intrinsically fainter than M87*, but we will eventually publish about it.
Can you combine the data over longer periods, so that you can expand the effective size to earth's orbital diameter over the course of 6 months? Just coordinating at the global scale seems like a huge accomplishment, but using orbital travel to expand the scope seems like an obvious step.
Do observatories coordinate over such long periods, or is time at a premium?
The effective size comes from interfering signals taken simultaneously at widely separated receivers, so no, you cannot increase effective size in that way. What you gain from increasing exposure time is that you can see fainter objects.
Fair enough. I suppose you can't even directly benefit from increased exposure times. However, tracking the dynamics seems valuable (as I assume you are doing).
