As observations become too numerous, it seems like it can be summarized as there now being too many possible candidate explanations. As data increases and becomes clearer, more and more things don't fit the existing theories.

What are the current theories explaining the early universe? What happened to the Big Bang? I only studied astronomy up to an undergraduate level, so I don't really know.

I imagine that various non-uniform gases were scattered around, and due to spatial distortions, those uniform gas regions clumped together, forming stars and other structures. Perhaps the expansion of space wasn't uniform either—it expanded unevenly, sometimes bulging, and when space expands or contracts, energy is generated, causing spacetime changes to shake the field, and that shaking might have created matter. Maybe the dynamic interaction between changing spacetime and fields revealed the energy stored in the field in the form of particles.

What do scientists think about this in modern cosmology? My knowledge is far too limited and I lack intuition, but reading science-related articles always excites me. Maybe it's because I still have some childlike curiosity left in me

The evidence for the big bang is generally not that if you look far enough back in a telescope, the universe looks younger, which is somewhat the layperson's confusion.

Evidence for the big bang is about measuring redshift of galaxies throughout universal history, homgeneity and thermal equilibrium of the universe and CMBR, which could only be explained by it all having been in a compressed location where it could reach thermal equilibrium at some point in the distant past.

None of that is challenged by the Webb observations about very young supermassive black holes.

In fact, the existence of supermassive black holes themselves has basically always been an unsolved problem even before Webb. The only known possible explanation (stellar collapse -> accretion -> supermassive black hole) could be ruled out even before Webb on theoretical and experimental grounds, we just have stronger evidence against it now. (To wit: if supermassive black holes form from stellar black holes by growing, you would expect to see lots of intermediate mass black holes. We see almost none. Furthermore, the process of accretion is extremely energetic, so IMBHs would be the most visible objects in the night sky. The fact we see none is doubly damning)

The mainstream position now will be big bang + some kind of primordial black hole formation during the very early stages of the universe. Work of Hawking/Penrose shows that black holes can form under generic conditions in solutions to the EFE equations. We have a general understanding of how they could come about from certain dense matter layouts in a standard GR cosmological model.

> spatial distortions

Acoustic distortions. The universe was small and dense enough for sound to travel through ‘space’, which was filled with plasma. The theory is that inflation blew up these tiny distortions to the scale of the structure we see in the universe.

I dont think about it because my days are occupied by very specific problems. Theory of Bounded Rationality and its implications apply.

With the caveat I'm summarising from what PBS Space Time and Dr Becky* say:

• Big Bang: we can only see back to surface of last scattering, i.e. the CMB, extrapolating backwards goes "???" at much the same point as it did a few decades back because we still have not unified quantum mechanics and general relativity

• CMB should only have isotope distribution of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, that hasn't changed in the last decades, dunno if that's what you meant by "various non-uniform gases were scattered around"?

• Variations in density of CMB do exist, key phrase is "Baryon acoustic oscillations", while they're very small magnitude they're also massive in distance scale, so they're how galactic clusters formed (that scale rather than stars directly): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_acoustic_oscillations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPpUxoeooZk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRUTnoveZs8

• Re: "Perhaps the expansion of space wasn't uniform either": I heard about specifically "Timescape Cosmology", but a quick search says that's part of a broader category of inhomogeneous cosmologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhomogeneous_cosmology#Timesc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXg6YVcdOcA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlNVZz5D6WE

• Re: "and when space expands or contracts, energy is generated": no, general relativity does not in general conserve energy, and it is related to the curvature of spacetime. Simple example is that the photons in the CMB have much less energy to us than they did to the atoms they were emitted from**: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04ERSb06dOg

* I assuming I'm correctly judging the level and attention to detail they're providing, given the detail they put in and references to specific research publications. My degree is Software Engineering.

** There's also a Veritasium video about this, but to me Veritasium feels like a BBC 2 evening popular science show, so I'm not as confident about recommending it.

I took a good long look at the CMB picture, including the caption. It basically says the Universe was one big hot apparently uniform ball at one stage.

I don't know what conditions were like before that stage, but like Eric Idle says, nothing can come from nothing.

Dark energy is a horse shit name for a theory that was horse shit to begin with. The Universe is probably just inhomogeneous, like your intuition is saying.