A prominent French physicist is apologizing after admitting that a viral photo of a “distant star” he shared on Twitter was not actually taken by the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) but was just a piece chorizo pork sausage.
On July 31, Etienne Klein, research director of the French Commission for Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy, tweeted the photo to his 90,000+ Twitter followers and claimed it was a new Webb telescope image showing the closest star to our Sun.
“An image of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years away,” Klein wrote in a Tweet (as translated by Google). “It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This level of detail… A new world is revealed day after day.”
Screenshot of Etienne Klein’s tweet.
The tweet went viral and was retweeted thousands of times as people marveled at the imaging power of the Webb Telescope, which wowed the world with previously impossible space pictures, including pictures of the oldest galaxies ever observed.
In subsequent tweets, Klein revealed that what he tweeted was simply a piece of Spanish sausage.
“Well, when it’s cocktail hour, cognitive biases seem to find something to feast on… Beware of it,” Klein wrote. “According to modern cosmology, no object associated with Spanish sausages exists anywhere but on Earth.
“In light of some of the comments, I feel obliged to clarify that this tweet showing an alleged snapshot of Proxima Centauri is a form of entertainment. Let us learn to be careful both with the arguments of authority and with the spontaneous eloquence of certain images…”
After receiving an angry backlash to his tweet, however, the scientist apologized a few days later for spreading “fake news” that confused a lot of people, saying it was just a joke meant to warn his followers to be careful with photos seen online.
“I come to offer my apologies to those whom my fraud, in which there was nothing original, may have shocked,” he wrote. “I just wanted to urge caution with images that seem eloquent on their own. A scientist’s joke.
The distinguished French physicist Etienne Klein. Photo by Thesupermat and licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Klein also tweeted Webb’s recent lovely photo of the Wheel galaxy, assuring his followers that the photo was “for real this time.”
“It’s the first time I joke, when I’m more in this network as a figure of scientific authority,” the physicist later told the Paris-based news magazine Le Point. “The good news is that some people picked up on the hoax right away, but it took two tweets to figure it out,” explains the researcher.
“It also illustrates the fact that in this type of social network, fake news is always more successful than real news.” I also think that if I hadn’t said it was a James Webb picture, it wouldn’t have been as successful.’
The James Webb Space Telescope launched in December 2021 and officially began making scientific observations on July 12, 2022. Now the largest optical telescope in space, it uses its unprecedented imaging capabilities to capture pioneering astronomical and cosmological images, including pictures of exoplanet atmospheres as well as the first stars and galaxies formed at the beginning of the universe.
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