The redshift occurs because photons lose energy as they travel. How big is a photon? I suspect that photons are huge 3-dimensional bell-curves, stretching to infinite at the edges. The peripheri of these wave packets are interfering with dust particles thousands of kilometers from the central wave peak. Sometimes they are refracted, sometimes absorbed. The photon increases in wavelength a little with each encounter.

Short of quoting SDAI, galaxies do look alot like vortices. Maybe they are. Sources and sinks. Black holes are perforations in our reality through which matter and energy flow. Our reality is like a holographic subset of some super-manifold. We don't know how big it really is. It could be a trillion lightyears across, and still just be a speck in the manifold.

Imagine the super-manifold. You emerge into something like the badlands from Star Trek Voyager. Above and below are plasma fields. Tornadoes are moving around, their tips intersecting what we primitive humans would see as the cores of galaxies. Our entire universe might look like a mobility-limited 2-dimensional plane.

When we transcend this futile existence, maybe that's what we'll see. As we leap upward from it.