According to the Indigo Girls song "Galilieo", what was Galileo's crime?

According to the Indigo Girls song “Galileo,” Galileo’s crime was “looking up the truth.”

The line appears in the song’s opening verse: “Galileo’s head was on the block / The crime was lookin’ up the truth.” Written by Emily Saliers, “Galileo” was released by the folk-rock duo on their 1992 album Rites of Passage.

The lyric uses Galileo as a symbol of intellectual curiosity and the risks of challenging accepted beliefs. Galileo Galilei supported the Sun-centered model of the universe, placing him in conflict with powerful religious and political authorities in seventeenth-century Italy. In 1633, the Roman Inquisition forced him to recant and sentenced him to house arrest.

The answer is sometimes shortened to “looking up,” but the song’s complete wording is “looking up the truth.” The lyric is poetic rather than a literal legal description of Galileo’s charge; his historical condemnation concerned his advocacy of heliocentrism.