I joked about the star – her picture is Spanish sausage

In late July, Etienne Klein, a prominent French physicist and head of the French Alternative Energy and Atomic Energy Authority, published what he claimed was a new high-resolution image of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system.

“Image of Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the Sun, located 4.2 light-years away from us, taken by the James Webb Telescope. This glut of detail…a new world is being revealed every day,” he captioned the post. On Twitter in front of over 90,000 followers.

Soon, the post was shared by thousands on the platform.

The thing is that the amazing richness of detail in the image of Proxima Centauri is not solar storms in our sister star.

Without smoked paprika in a thin slice of chorizo ​​depicted on a black background. Something that CNN also reported.

Soon after the post was published, he admitted the joke in a Twitter thread, urging his followers not to believe anything that underscores their worldview.

He joked in another post: “According to the latest cosmological research, there is no organism related to Spanish charcuterie anywhere other than on Earth.”

The prank led to some backlash and the French scientist finally felt compelled to respond to criticism after the star’s purported image taken by the new James Webb Telescope.

“In light of some of the comments, I feel compelled to explain that this tweet featuring an alleged photo of Proxima Centauri was a joke. Let’s learn to be as wary of arguments from positions of authority as we are of the spontaneous rhetoric of certain images.”

Since then, the Frenchman has also apologized for the joke.

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