It was here at the beginning of the universe that scientists found the answer to the ultimate question about the life of stars, where did the hydrogen to make the very first ones come from?

This very early instant came a primordial soup of energy and matter that had to cool before it could become the elements of hydrogen and helium that made everything else in the universe we know today, every hydrogen atom that fuelled every star was made in those first few minutes of the Big Bang.

The extraordinary thing about the lifecycle of the stars is that it revealed the origin of the universe, the elements, even of us, but that isn't quite the end of the star story, astronomers have discovered one other tantalizing fact as they looked out into the dark sky, in nebulae formed from the remnants of stars and where the next generation are born, they have discovered the earliest stirrings of life.