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A leading scientist at a French nuclear energy institute shared what he claimed was an incredible deep space photo this week.
The photo, which he said came from NASA's incredible new James Webb Space Telescope, was supposed to be of the nearest star to the Sun, aka 'Proxima'.
Posting the image on Twitter, Étienne Klein said: "This level of detail… a new world is revealed day after day."
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The only problem? The photo was not of a distant star in deep space, but of a slice of chorizo.
The image shows the chorizo on a black background, perfectly resembling photographs of the Sun. However, instead of burning nodes of insanely hot plaza, it is actually the fat of the chorizo depicted in the image.
After being dragged across the coals on social media, Klein outlined the hoax to his followers, saying: "According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but Earth."
He told a French newspaper that the response to his post "illustrates the fact that on this type of social network, fake news is always more successful than real news. I also think that if I hadn't said it was a James-Webb photo, it wouldn't have been so successful."
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Indeed, many Twitter users in France were fooled. One person said: "Like an idiot, I got screwed."
The James Webb Telescope was launched this summer and is the highest-resolution space telescope in existence.
Astronomy fans have already been wowed with some of the images it has captured from the oldest galaxies in the universe.
Surprisingly, the £8 billion telescope actually has less storage space than an iPhone, with just 64GB of storage onboard the craft. Despite this, it's still happily plodding along through space around a million miles away from Earth.
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