Google celebrates Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaitre’s 124th birth anniversary on Tuesday. To mark this day, the search engine giant dedicated a special doodle to the great man who divulged the truth behind the expanding universe. The doodle shows Georges Lemaitre in place of one of the O’s of Google’s logo on the search page. Rest of the letters are replaced by the stars of the universe.
Born on July 17, 1894, Lemaitre proposed what is known as the "Big Bang theory", the origin of the universe.He called it as the "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or the "Cosmic Egg".
Lemaitre was a Belgian Catholic priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven.He is the man who proposed a theory that described the universe was in a constant expanding state.
It was soon confirmed afterwards by Edwin Hubble.
Lemaitre was also the first to derive what is now known as 'Hubble's law' and also derived the first estimation of what is now called the 'Hubble constant'.It was published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article.
In 1933 he delivered a series of lectures at the California Institute of Technology. The lecture was attended by some of the greatest scientists of the time, who gathered from all the around the world to listen to him. After he delivered his lecture, Albert Einstein stoop and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I ever listened."
In 1966, he passed away after discovering the cosmic microwave background radiation, which added weight to his theory on the birth of the universe.
