This Was an Epic Troll

Photo de Proxima du Centaure, l’étoile la plus proche du Soleil, située à 4,2 année-lumière de nous.
Elle a été prise par le JWST.
Ce niveau de détails… Un nouveau monde se dévoile jour après jour. pic.twitter.com/88UBbHDQ7Z

— Etienne KLEIN (@EtienneKlein) July 31, 2022

I am feeling the urge for mustard and rye

One of the most prominent physicists in the world has presented slice of sausage as the latest photograph from the James Webb telescope.

Étienne Klein has since apologized for posting a picture of a slice of chorizo while claiming that it was an image of Proxima Centauri.

He intended to do this to encourage people to use a skeptical eye on images that seem to be too good to be true.

Well played, my Gallic plaisantin:

If you’re not an expert on the cosmos, it’s very easy to confuse a view of a burning star with that of a sliced up piece of sausage. Well, only if it’s a particularly majestic-looking Chorizo tweeted by a famed astronomer.

French physicist Étienne Klein recently trolled his followers on Twitter by posting a picture of a Chorizo slice, and claiming that it was the star Proxima Centauri as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). “This level of detail… A new world is revealed day after day,” Klein wrote on Twitter.

The tweet was liked and retweeted by more than 20,000 thousand people before Klein revealed that the image was, in fact, a piece of Spanish smoked sausage, not the closest star to the Sun. Klein later apologized to those who fell for the joke, adding that he “simply wanted to urge caution with images that seem eloquent on their own.”

"Simply wanted to urge caution with images," my ass.  He was punking us all, and laughing about it.

Not surprising for a people who made a fart act the most popular entertainer at the turn of the last century.*

^*Joseph "Le Pétomane" Pujol, a French flatulist, "Some of the highlights of his stage act involved sound effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms, as well as playing "'O Sole Mio" and "La Marseillaise" on an ocarina through a rubber tube in his anus."