"Scientist's Joke": French Physicist Shares Sausage Photo As 'Star', Apologises

The picture was not of the intriguing star just over four light-years from the Sun but a far more modest slice of the lip-sizzling Spanish sausage chorizo.

A red ball of spicy fire with luminous patches glowing menacingly against a black background.

This, prominent French scientist Etienne Klein declared, was the latest astonishing picture taken by the James Webb Space Telescope of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Sun.

Fellow Twitter users marvelled at the details on the picture purportedly taken by the telescope, which has thrilled the world with images of distant galaxies going back to the birth of the universe.

"This level of detail... A new world is revealed every day," he gushed.