Google Doodle celebrates Georges Lemaitre, the man behind Big Bang theory

Google on Tuesday celebrated the 124th birth anniversary of Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaitre with a doodle. Lemaitre was best known for formulating the modern Big Bang Theory in 1927.

The Doodle shows Lemaitres at the center of a "constantly expanding universe" which he had first theorised in his works.

According to the Google Doodle, Lemaitre had accurately estimated a numerical value which was later known as the Hubble Constant. The Hubble constant is a unit of measurement which describes the rate of expansion.

More than Lemaitre, it was Hubble who received the recognition for coming up with the idea of the Big Bang Theory. However, later Lemaitre received his due.

Born on 17 July 1894 at Charleroi, Belgium, Georges Henri Joseph Edouard Lemaitre was not only a catholic priest but also an astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. He referred to the Big Bang Theory as "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or the "Cosmic Egg".

He is also acknowledged with proposing the concept the universe expanded from an initial point, which he called the "primeval atom" or "the Cosmic Egg, exploding at the moment of the creation".

Georges Lemaitre received the highest Belgian scientific distinction, the Francqui Prize, in 1934. He was elected a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1936, and remained an active member until his death.

He died on 20 June 1966, shortly after having learned of the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, which provided further evidence for his own intuitions about the birth of the universe.