On July 31, Etienne Klein, director of research at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, posted the photo to his 90,000+ Twitter followers and claimed it was a new Webb telescope photo showing the closest star to our Sun.
“Image of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years away,” Klein tweeted (as translated by Google). “Taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. That level of detail… A new world is revealed day by 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 has wowed the world with pictures of space that were never before possible, including shots of the oldest galaxies ever observed.
In a subsequent tweet, Klein revealed that what he had sent was just a slice of Spanish sausage.
“Well, when it’s cocktail hour, cognitive bias seems to find a lot to enjoy… Watch out,” Klein writes. “According to modern cosmology, no object related to Spanish sausages exists anywhere else but on Earth.
“In light of some comments, I feel compelled to clarify that this tweet showing an alleged snapshot of Proxima Centauri was a form of entertainment. Let us learn to be wary of the arguments of authority as well as of the spontaneous eloquence of certain images…”
However, after receiving angry backlash to his tweet, the scientist apologized a few days later for spreading “fake news” that confused many people, saying it was just a joke meant to warn his followers to be careful with the photos . appear online.
“I come to apologize to those whom my prank, which had nothing original in it, may have shocked,” he writes. “I just wanted to urge caution with images that seem eloquent in themselves. A scientist’s joke.”
The eminent French physicist Etienne Klein. Photo by Thesupermat and licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Klein also tweeted Webb’s recent great photo of the Cartwheel Galaxy, assuring his followers that the photo was “for real this time.”
“It’s 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 people immediately understood the deception, but it also took two tweets to clarify,” explains the researcher.
“It also proves the fact that in these kinds of social networks, 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 groundbreaking astronomical and cosmological images, including shots of atmospheres exoplanets as well as the first stars and galaxies that formed at the beginning of the universe.
