A NEW group formed to further research the Big Bang Theory has been named in memory of an eight-year-old who died from a rare form of cancer.

Callands Community Primary School pupil Ava Scott, was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma in 2012 and died in September 2013 at the age of eight.

Now Ava, who lived in Kingswood, has been remembered by a new group researching the Big Bang in partnership with scientists at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland.

AVA, or Accelerators Validating Antimatter physics, will be launched by Professor Carsten Welsch of the Cockcroft Institute and the University of Liverpool on Thursday, January 12.

The group will research why equal amounts of matter and antimatter cannot be found by scientists.

Great Sankey resident Professor Welsch said: "At the moment we think that nature is symmetrical and that is why our current models of physics fail to explain antimatter.

"We know that antimatter can exist - indeed positrons, the antimatter particle of the electron, are created and used in hospital every day for PET scans for cancer diagnosis.

"However, according to scientific theories, every type of matter in the universe created after the Big Bang should have been accompanied by equal amounts of antimatter but this isn't so.

"If we can find out why this would have massive implications.

"At the moment all the theories assume symmetry and this creates a picture of the universe that sort of makes sense - that is until we do an experiment that proves otherwise."