As our understanding of the Universe advances — and as we collect more comprehensive, better data about all that’s out there — we sometimes find that the actual Universe winds up defying our greatest expectations. Despite how impressive our model of reality has become, and how successfully we’ve put a wide variety of cosmic puzzle pieces together, every once in a while, new data comes along that winds up not only surprising us, but it forces us to rewrite the story we tell ourselves about what occurs, or even what’s possible, in our Universe.

Based on gravity, electromagnetism, and quantum and nuclear physics at a fundamental level, we have a theoretical foundation that underlies every object and phenomenon in the Universe. Given a set of initial conditions for a physical system, we can use these laws to predict what’s going to happen: at least under certain assumptions and with making some simplifying assumptions.…