A couple of interesting posts on Phys Org regarding new papers published. Seems Wal Thornhill was perhaps on the ball when he said the new Webb telescope will spring a few surprises for mainstream. Sadly, he didn’t live to see it. At https://phys.org/news/2023-06-webb-earliest-strands-cosmic-web.html … the Webb telescope can peer further into space than any previous telescope. It has found that galaxies are not scattered randomly across the universe. They form clusters, or strings of galaxies, and are strung together by vast filamentary structures with barren voids in between. Astronomers have found a thread like arrangement of ten galaxies. These are considered to have existed around 830 million years after Big Bang. The structure is enhanced by luminous gases – a galaxy with an active supermassive black hole at its core. The filament took them by surprise. It is long and narrow. The filament is directly connected to a qasar.
At https://phys.org/news/2023-06-cosmological-built-simple-century-old-idea.html … our ideas about the universe over the last 100 years or so, and the very idea of a cosmological principle, may have to be revised. This is that the universe is homogenous and matter is distributed evenly throughout. This led to mathematics being applied to space time – and the application of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity as applied to the universe as a whole. Cosmological models are based on this assumption.
However, new space telescopes deliver ever more precise images and the idea of a cosmological principle is now being challenged. Mildly at the moment but it could gather momentum. How does it square with the discovery of a giant arc of qasars, as an example. Is it time for certain assumptions to be re-examined? There is no direct evidence of uniformity.