A New Cosmological Model

The discovery of a galactic merger of 14 galaxies is causing me to rethink the Big Bang model of the universe.  Galactic mergers like this, in theory, aren't supposed to merge so early in the universe's history.  It's making me wonder if we might actually be looking into a whole different universe, or the far distant future of our own.  Traditionally it's thought that the farther we look, the farther into the past we can see, and the closer to the Big Bang we get.  This groundbreaking observation would seemingly dispel that myth, because mergers this size aren't mathematically possible with the current cosmological models. 

In the scenario that we are looking into the future, either the arrow of time has been reversed at some point on the visual horizon, or we're looking so far into the curvature of space-time that we've come "half-circle" to the other side of the resultant sphere.  The latter actually makes the most sense to me.  It's making me think the map of the universe might already be set in stone, i.e., not always expanding, but simply recycling itself on the surface of what we'd think of as a 3-dimensional sphere (literally 4-d in space-time).  The "sphere" would collapse and expand with regularity, and we're able to see into its future because the added dimension of time allows us to see light at different intervals of existence.  Essentially it means we haven't been looking "out" into the universe all this time, but "through" the sphere to other points in space-time, where the light on its surface can be seen.  This would also (perhaps alarmingly) imply there was no Big Bang, because we haven't seen it yet through this cycle.  It would imply the universe is simply contracting and expanding- not contracting all the way, as it would in a Big Bang; maybe it can't do that.  

For the record, I highly doubt this is the discovery of another universe.  I'm more open to a theory that would keep the Big Bang in context and allow these super-galactic mergers to happen so early in time.  It just doesn't make any sense to think that way at this point.  I'd also be interested in the idea of dark matter being the space inside this hypothetical space-time sphere.  When the universe is "old", there's more dark matter because the volume of the sphere is larger (and less when younger).