The Milky Way Is a Dense Band of Stars

We don't see a big, perfect grid of stars that surrounds us and fills the whle universe as far as we can see. It appears that it never clicked for newton that the milky way is a huge problem for his theory. He then argued that god must occasionally nudge them to keep them in place so they don't collapse. That didn't satisfy everybody, but the idea that the universe is infinite in size stuck because humans are bad at imagining how space could be finite in size.