Viral star photo actually a sausage. Hoaxer physicist sorry.

Saying "Don't share viral hoaxes on social media" is the most effective technique to warn people against doing so.

The least efficient strategy is probably to spread a hoax online and then claim that you were trying to educate people about them.

On July 31, École Centrale Paris physicist Étienne Klein tweeted a snapshot of a cut chorizo sausage on Twitter.

He said it was a James Webb Space Telescope shot of Proxima Centauri.

"This degree of... Every day a new universe is exposed," he remarked in the body of his tweet.

His post has been retweeted 4,846 times as of this writing, perhaps because it appears like a Proxima Centauri photo to the nearly 8 billion non-physicists in the world.

According to Klein, the image that was shared on the image-sharing platform Imgur in 2018 contained a joke that was similar but grammatically incorrect.

Imgur user superl0pez posted, "Blood Moon as it can viewed currently in Spain."

After Klein's chorizo joke went up, uncertainty reigned for a moment, according to Le Point. Some users pointed out that the sausage was a sausage, while others shared what looked like a star.