What you're describing is gravitational lensing. It can make one galaxy appear to be several in different places or shapes. It is, however, well understood.
My hunch is that rather than space being a contiguous void with isolated mass of gravity behaving like tiny monopolar magnets, at the intersection between different mass systems there are 'surfaces' of some sort like the walls of a bubble in a pile of foam, and that if you could encounter this 'surface' you would either be repelled by it (most likely) or make contact and be able to slide around on it, and then once you got to the angles where walls joins, you would be able to zip along the intersections at great speed in ways that defy conventional physics. I can't really explain it in greater depth, it's an intuition that's half lifelong fascination with looking at soap films and what foam does, and half 'it came to me in a dream.'
I don't know where or when it was taken, or what part of the sky that happens in. Maybe it's just a really long lens, so it's seeing "through" the galaxy we normally see "stars" from?
Anyhow, how do you think you could prove this or how someone could prove it? Is it like, two observers on opposite sides of the planet observing the same thing, say during an eclipse or something? Maybe radioastronomy?
We see stars in our galaxy because they are close enough to us that we see them as individual stars. Compare that to the Andromeda Galaxy, which is far enough away that without intense zoom, it looks like a single source of light. There are galaxies even farther away, which we cannot see with the naked eye at all, but zooming in on them like Hubble did means we eventually get enough resolution to see they are individual galaxies, unfathomably far away.
JWST being able to see infrared means we'll see galaxies that are so far away, their light is redshifted so we (and Hubble) cannot even see them at all.
With regards to your question about how to test the bubble hypothesis posted by parent, we would be limited by how variable our point of view can be. We can gather what data we can at one end of Earth's orbit, and then try to see from the opposite end and compare what we see, comparing data sets to see if certain galaxies or stars are in different positions. We already do some of this when dealing with gravitational lensing and I believe it's one of the primary ways we can detect black holes, as they bend light a lot.
this is what i was thinking of; thanks for the hubble reference, though!
Hyperspace lanes!