
Cosmic Mirage of Radio Waves
A galaxy is like a glowing pancake studded with stars. If you look at it face-on, you see everything at once — both the bright spiral arms and the dark dust lanes. But tilt the pancake, and the picture changes: layers overlap, light blends together. This very effect, it turns out, creates the illusion of a tight link between radio and gamma-ray emission in distant star systems.