Projected cosmic-ray density as a function of the distance from the GC, computed using a 3D reconstruction of the gas distribution in the region. The profiles are inferred from the estimate using the random line-of-sight shifts of the underlying gas distribution (see Sect. 4.2 for details). The true profile assumed in the simulation is ρ_CR ≈ r⁻¹. Dashed and dotted red lines represent the exact solutions for the α = {0.5, 1, 1.5, 2} cases, respectively, arbitrarily scaled to fit the image.