[throwanem]

The nice thing about atomic theory is that it doesn't really have that kind of hole in it. If you find, say, a sample of an island-of-stability metal you've never seen before and didn't even think was all that likely to be able to exist, you can still study and characterize it in terms of those materials we are more familiar with. You're right that we don't understand everything about the universe. But what we do understand generalizes well enough to cover the "alien alloys" case.

The alternative possibility is that there are places in the universe where fundamental physics works totally differently from here, yet materials formed there can exist here in an apparently stable state - an entire second physical system, never so much as hinted at in any of our own investigations. That would be considerably more surprising than a reporter through ignorance and haste having mischaracterized the content of a story! Reporters do that all the time.