French scientist Etienne Klein admits to make a 'joke' on Twitter. Find out what was it
Etienne Klein, a French physicist, recently posted a picture of a Chorizo and claimed it to be Proxima Centauri. He is now under the scanner as he has admitted to making the joke. He had shared a picture with his followers on Twitter and allegedly...
By ET Spotlight Special |
AP
French scientist Etienne Klein tweeted an image of a glowing red circle and captioned it as Proxima Centauri on July 31. Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our Sun.
Etienne Klein is the director and physicist at the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in France. He tweeted that the image was of Proxima Centauri, the Sun's nearest star (located around 4.2 light years away from us). He also tweeted that a new world unveils itself every day, and the level of detail is good.
The tweet got thousands of likes. However, Klein admitted that the image was of smoked sausage (Chorizo) and nothing that is found in space, let alone the Proxima Centauri later on.
Klein went on to post that the fake image was just a source of amusement and clarified it through his tweet. He gave an interview to Le Point and said that it was meant as a joke.
He said it's only the first time he has made a joke of such sort as a scientific authority figure. He also said that while he was happy that some people immediately understood the joke, others took two clarification tweets to understand.
He added that fake news gets more attention and is more popular than real news in this kind of network. He noted that if he hadn't said that it was a James Webb Space Telescope picture, it would not have gotten the attention it did.
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Europe's Spaceport launched the James Webb Space Telescope on an Ariane 5 rocket in December last year. NASA released the telescope's first images in July.
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