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Three years ago, Carles Badenes and his fellow astrophysicist Todd Thompson were at a conference where researchers were invited to put together impromptu proposals — pitched and awarded in the same weekend — in hopes of getting a small amount of seed funding to pursue a “crazy idea.”

But not long into the search, they – along with a third partner in the project, Kevin Covey of Western Washington University — found what they were looking for, a discovery