The photo, which had gone viral, was accompanied by the caption “Photo of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, located at a distance of 4.2 light years from us. Taken by JWST. This level of detail… Day by day, a new world is revealed”
In the midst of a “bombardment” of revelatory photos of outer space from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, French physicist Étienne Klein surprised the 90,000 followers of his Twitter account by posting a photo of Proxima Centauri. constellation Centaurus and is the closest star to our Solar System.
Several days later he admitted that it was a photo of a slice of chorizo sausage and explained that his move was a warning to be careful in the face of viral astronomical photos.
The photo, which had gone viral, was accompanied by the caption “Photo of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, located at a distance of 4.2 light years from us. Taken by JWST. This level of detail… Day by day, a new world is revealed”
After thousands of views, likes and retweets, Klein, who is director of research at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, clarified that it was a photo of a slice of chorizo sausage and that it was a hoax. “Ok, when it’s aperitif time, cognitive bias seems to have plenty of room to kick in… Watch out for that,” he wrote in a follow-up tweet. “According to modern cosmology, no object related to Spanish charcuterie can be found anywhere else but on Earth.”
Later and after the outrage of viewers who felt cheated, Étienne Klein issued an apology and emphasized that this post was a kind of warning in an age of viral astronomical photos. “Let us learn to be cautious before arguments from authorities, as well as before the spontaneous eloquence of some photographs,” he stressed. Speaking to Le Point about his original post, he said: “It also proves that in this type of social media, fake news is always more successful than real news. I think if I hadn’t said it was a James Webb photo it wouldn’t have been so successful.”
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