Research is no different.
In the 14 April issue of Science , a team of astronomers reports solving the riddle of a mysterious infrared light that shines from a handful of stars. The lucky break came when one of them toured a physics lab. But researchers had been scratching their heads after the Infrared Astronomy Satellite discovered a strong radiation band at a wavelength of 20.1 micrometers in the spectrum of one dying star in the early 1980s. Nobody knew what caused it. But recently, astronomer Xander Tielens of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands was visiting the FOM Institute for Plasma Physics in Rijnhuizen, also in the Netherlands.