SCIENTISTS from a North-East university have shed new light on the beginnings of the universe.

A Durham University team has recreated the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang on a powerful computer simulator to uncover some of the deepest secrets of the universe, including the formation of black holes and the make-up of "dark matter" - the mysterious material that plays a crucial role in the birth of stars.

The cosmologists have discovered that some of our nearest neighbours were among the very first stars to form, about 13 billion years ago.

The research, published today in the international academic journal Science suggests the formation of the first stars depends on the nature of the "dark matter" involved, and suggests that some of the very first stars that formed can still be found today in our own Milky Way galaxy.

Cosmologists believe that, after the Big Bang, the universe was mostly smooth, with just small ripples in the density of matter - ripples which grew larger over the next 100 million years until, eventually, gas was pulled by gravity into forming stars.

The team from Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology used sophisticated computer simulations to recreate the birth of the stars, using models of slow-moving "cold dark matter" and faster-moving "warm dark matter".

They discovered that a concentration of "cold dark matter" led to the gradual creation of a single short-lived star, about 100 times bigger than our own Sun.

However, a mass of "warm dark matter" would produce a starburst, creating a cluster of stars of different sizes which have survived until today.

The starbursts occurred, they discovered, in improbably-long, thin filaments.

Researcher Dr Liang Gao said: "These filaments would have been about 9,000 light years long, which is about a quarter of the size of the Milky Way galaxy today. The very luminous starburst would have lit-up the dark universe in spectacular fashion."

Co-researcher Dr Tom Theuns said: "A key question that astronomers often ask is 'where are the descendants of the first stars today?'

"The answer is that, if the dark matter is warm, some of these primordial stars should be lurking around our galaxy."

The research also gives new insight into the formation of the monster black holes, some more than a billion times the mass of the Sun, which are found at the centre of most galaxies.

The team believes that the black holes may well have been caused by the young stars in the overcrowded filament colliding with each other.