A French scientist who had posted an image of a distant star on his Twitter feed, claiming it had been taken by the James Webb telescope, has revealed it was actually a slice of chorizo.

The 64-year-old director of research at the French Commission of Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Étienne Klein said he had shared the image to remind social media users of the need to be wary of fake news circulated online, Al Arabiya reports quoting Britain's The Times newspaper.

Klein tweeted an image of what he claimed was the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri.
He said that it was captured by NASA's new $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, which is revealing some of the universe's very first stars, reports Al Arabiya.

Thousands of people retweeted the image and left comments on it because they trusted the veracity of an image shared by an accomplished scientist.
A day later however, Klein admitted that the image was actually a piece of the well-known Spanish sausage and not a far-off star.

"Let's learn to distrust claims by (figures of) authority as well as the spontaneous eloquence of certain images," he said.