Don’t Feel Bad About Falling for the Viral Space Chorizo
Updated at 10:39 a.m. on August 11, 2022
Recently, a French physicist posted a picture online that he described as simply remarkable. The image, Étienne Klein said, was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, the world's newest and most powerful space observatory. It showed Proxima Centauri, a star about 4.2 light-years from us, our sun’s closest neighbor, Klein explained in his tweet. “This level of detail,” he said, the awe evident. “A new world is revealed day after day.”
By now you might have seen the picture, which went viral: a deep-red sphere suspended in inky darkness, its surface gently textured with bright spots.: That’s no star. It is sausage—a cross section of chorizo, to be precise. Klein’s Proxima Centauri was a prank, and thousands of people had fallen for it.
