Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, 1894-1966. Credit: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, 1894-1966. Credit: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs) are an essential contribution by Europe to running the International Space Station. Naming the fifth after Belgian scientist Georges Lemaître continues the tradition of drawing on great European visionaries to reflect Europe’s deep roots in science, technology and culture.

Georges Lemaître is known as the father of the Big Bang theory.

The name, proposed by Belgium’s delegation to ESA, was endorsed on 14-15 February by the ESA Programme Board responsible for Space Station matters during a meeting at ESA Headquarters in Paris.

Full details via ESA web

Georges Lemaître was born on 17 July 1894 in Charleroi, Belgium. He obtained his doctorate in physics and mathematics in 1920 and was ordained a priest in 1923.

He then became a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Cambridge in England studying cosmology, stellar astronomy and numerical analysis.

In 1925, after two years of studies at Harvard and MIT in the USA, he returned to Belgium and became a full-time professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he remained for the rest of his career.

In 1927, he discovered a family of solutions to Einstein’s relativity equations that described an expanding Universe rather than a static one, and provided the first observational estimation of the Hubble constant. The theory later became much better known as the Big Bang theory .

Lemaître was awarded the highest Belgian scientific distinction and was appointed a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1936, remaining active there in until his death in 1966, shortly after having learned of the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation that provided further proof of his theory about the birth of the Universe.