Prominent French physicist apologizes after admitting a viral photo of “distant star” he shared on Twitter was not captured by the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) but was just a slice of chorizo sausage.
On July 31, Etienne Klein, director of research at the French Commission for Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy, tweeted the photo to his more than 90,000 Twitter followers and claimed it was a new photo from the Webb telescope showing the ‘closest star to our Sun.
“Image of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years from us,” Klein wrote in the Tweet (translated by Google). “It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This level of detail… A new world is being discovered every day.”
A 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 has been surprising the world with space photos never before possible, including photos of the oldest galaxies never observed
In follow-up tweets, Klein revealed that what he had tweeted was just a slice of Spanish sausage.
“Well, when it’s cocktail hour, the cognitive bias seems to find a lot to enjoy… Watch out for that,” Klein writes. “According to contemporary cosmology, no object related to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere other than on Earth.
“In light of some of the comments, I feel compelled to clarify that this tweet showing an alleged snapshot of Proxima Centauri was a form of fun. We learn to distrust the arguments of authority as much as the spontaneous eloquence of certain pictures…”
However, after receiving an angry backlash to his tweet, the scientist apologized a few days later for spreading “fake news” that confused quite a few people, claiming it was just a joke meant to warn his followers to be careful with the photos seen online
“I come to offer my apologies to those who might have been surprised by my unoriginal deception,” he writes. “I just wanted to be careful with images that seem eloquent on their own. Scientist’s joke.”
The outstanding French physicist Etienne Klein. Photo by Thesupermat and licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.
Klein also tweeted Webb’s recent photo of the Cartwheel Galaxy, assuring his followers that the photo was “real this time.”
“This is the first time I make a 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 immediately understood the hoax, but it also took two tweets to clear up,” explains the researcher.
“It also illustrates the fact that in this type of social media, fake news is always more successful than real news. I also think that if I hadn’t said it was a James-Webb photo, it wouldn’t have been as successful.”
The James Webb Space Telescope was launched in December 2021 and officially began making scientific observations on July 12, 2022. Now, the largest optical telescope in space, it is using its unprecedented imaging capabilities to capturing pioneering astronomical and cosmological images, including photographs of exoplanet atmospheres. as well as the first stars and galaxies created at the beginning of the universe.