On a slightly grander scale than the chicken or the egg, astronomers think they've figured out the cosmic version of the debate.

The vast majority of galaxies have been found to harbour a dark secret - its own personal black-hole and while some have become dormant, others are not and constantly consume the galaxy around them at an almost incomprehensible speed. Nothing escapes their gluttony, not even light.

Now, I've always been taught that black-holes form when an object reaches its critical density - in that cannot obtain anymore mass and its own gravity turns against it causing the object to basically crush itself. When applied to stars, it means that the star has exhausted itself and can no longer produce energy at its core which has been keeping it stable.

So it would seem fitting to think that galaxies, with all their stars, came first and in turn created black-holes as they eventually lost energy and succumbed to gravity. Until you're told that black-holes can, theoretically (it's all theory, by the way), form from super massive clouds of gas collapsing.

Now, however, scientists think they've figured out that it was the holes that came first, not the galaxies; - it seems that the galaxies have formed around their black-holes.

It's already been noted how there seems to be a correlation between the mass of a black hole and the central 'bulges' of galaxy centres and near-by stars & gas with the mass of a black-hole usually being around 1000th that of the surrounding 'bulge'. There seemed to be some kind of relationship and it was unknown which grew first or if indeed they grew together.

Okay, bear with me here, it can be a tad confusing but; -

• light travels at roughly 299,792,458 metres per second (185000 miles per second).

This basically means that the light we see today shining from the stars in our sky began their journeys many, many years ago - I don't mean decades or centuries but thousands and millions and billions of years ago; we are essentially gazing back in time when we look up at a starry sky.

Scientists use this fact and are now, with amazingly accurate and powerful instruments, able to look further and further into space and away from Earth, giving them the ability to peer further and further back in time to the near beginning of the entire universe, back to when galaxies were only just beginning to form themselves.

"We finally have been able to measure black-hole and bulge masses in several galaxies seen as they were in the first billion years after the Big Bang," said Fabian Walter of the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany.

"The evidence suggests that the constant ratio seen [between black-hole mass and the size of the galaxy’s bulge] may not hold in the early Universe....The implication is that the black holes started growing first."