What moves the heavens above?

The standard cosmological model (ΛCDM) assumes that everything started in a singular Big Bang out of Cosmic Inflation, a mysterious form of modern Aether (the inflaton). Here we look for direct observational evidence for such beginning in two recent measurements: 1) cosmic acceleration, something ΛCDM attributes to Dark Energy (DE), 2) discordant measurements for H₀ and anomalies in the CMB. We find here that observed variations in H₀ correspond to large metric perturbations that are not consistent with the simplest models of Inflation or DE in the ΛCDM paradigm. Together, these observations indicate instead that cosmic expansion could originate from a simple gravitational collapse and bounce. We conjecture that such bounce is trigger by neutron degeneracy at GeV energies. This new paradigm explains the heavens above using only the known laws of Physics, without any new Aether, DE or Inflation.