Astronomer Edwin Hubble's landmark paper on the rate of expansion of the universe was published in 1929, overturning the long-held belief among scientists that the universe was static and unchanging.

That's why the Hubble Constant (the number that describes the rate of expansion) is named after him, not to mention the Hubble Space Telescope.

Less well known is that Hubble might not have been the first the person to make this momentous discovery.

A Belgian priest and cosmologist named Georges Lemaitre published a paper reaching very similar conclusions two years earlier. It's a contentious issue among cosmologists, needless to say.

The problem was, Lemaitre's paper was in French, and appeared in a rather obscure journal: Annals of the Brussels Scientific Society. This limited its distribution throughout the scientific community (at least initially).

Yet even when his paper was finally translated and broadly disseminated, certain key elements went missing, sparking rumors that prominent scientists -- Sir Arthur Eddington, perhaps, or even Hubble himself -- had deliberately "censored" Lemaitre's paper to ensure Hubble's scientific legacy....