The internet is full of jaw dropping images, and recently most of those have been coming from the James Webb Space Telescope as it sends photos of distant space to Earth. Of course, the internet is also home to jokes gone horribly wrong and the apologies that tend to follow. Somehow a French scientist managed to combine the two, as he recently apologized after sharing a photo he claimed was from the James Webb Space Telescope, when in fact it was actually just a slice of chorizo.
Étienne Klein is a celebrated physicist and director at France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, but recently he was forced to apologize after trying to make a joke on social media. Klein tweeted out a photo of a red circle against a black background with a caption that translates to “Picture of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years away from us. It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This level of detail... A new world is unveiled every day.”
The photo quickly went viral with many of Klein’s 91,000 followers commenting and retweeting without knowing the photo was actually an image of chorizo. According to CNN, Klein later apologized, but not before facing backlash from the science community. Maybe he was just trying to say that the chorizo he was eating was “out of this world.”
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