Why is there no outrage? He is a scientist and he lied. Why does he still have his Twitter account? How can anyone believe anything ‘scientists’ say about Covid? About climate change?
Here's the thing. The post was a joke for other scientists.. ON Twitter.
It's not like they were trying to advance their scientific career with fabricated findings.
The target audience got a kick out of it. I'm certain.
A predictable percentage of onlookers are predictably salty that they got fooled by a figure of authority.. I don't think an apology is really warranted. But they handled it well.
That said, in a world that is constantly trying to maliciously misinform a person, it's understandable that the audience is a bit touchy about being fucked with .
It wasn't fake news. It had the opposite intent of fake news. It was designed to get people who wouldn't immediately know it was fake to think for once, a challenging task these days. Nobody who matters, or who cares the slightest bit about astronomy, thought that was a star (Proxima Centauri) or even a planet (compare the recent JWST image of Jupiter). It looks nothing like any other astronomical object other than being round (but oddly dimpled) and reddish. Butchery does not recapitulate astronomy.
Outrage is from Karens who wanted something new to be outraged about.
Get people to think? What are they supposed to think about?
Honestly, it irks me a bit when people repeat the mantra "think for yourself" without thinking. To "think for yourself" about a topic requires a foundation of knowledge -- hopefully based on facts -- about that topic.
When I read an article about the trouble drilling holes through certain types of rocks, no amount of "thinking for myself" will help me discern the accuracy of the article. When I read an article about the impact of Russian military culture on political decision making, no amount of "thinking" will help me determine how biased it is. When I see a tweet about a star with an image, no amount of "thinking" will help me determine if it's real or not.
I simply lack the expertise to "think" about these fields. I guess I could fool myself into believing that with a few hours of browsing around, I could make an informed assessment. But I stopped thinking that way as I grew older (and hopefully at least a tiny bit wiser).
"Why is there nothing of significance in the background?"
"Why are there no diffraction spikes? When do diffraction spikes occur?"
"Why is this showing surface detail vastly more detailed than any previous image which only showed vague shapes of even the closest stars (other than Sol)? How much better can the Webb image stars compared to Hubble?"
"Why does this have so little noise compared to the recent Jupiter image?"
"Why is the border not perfectly round?"
"Why does part of the surface look shinier than the rest? Is there some odd effect going on with false-color or color grading?"
"What's with the odd features on the surface? Why don't they look anything like our sun's sunspots?"
And of course the most important thing...
"After looking at it for 30 seconds, and really trying to categorize it, what does my brain tell me it looks like?"
Well... sure. If I look at this, something is off for me and I get the cue (I would not say it was chorizo, though), but he released it into the wild. For many this would not be a joke until they see follow up tweet - they are missing this cue. I am not in the camp of delicate snowflakes, but he shouldn't be surprised doing it like this in the wild.
Added - ...and I surely know it's just too big. It's just not so much good of a joke, I think.