Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
Scientists have peered at Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night painting and discovered it displays a startling resemblance to real atmospheric turbulence.
To see stars, one needs clear skies. But just because we can’t see it, doesn’t mean there aren’t intricate patterns of air movement above us on a clear night.
A paper published in Physics of Fluids suggests that van Gogh had an “intuitive” understanding of this while making his famous painting in 1889.
A Chinese and French team analysed the brush strokes in The Starry Night, aiming to see how similar they were to real atmospheric movements.
The masterpiece has been the subject of several atmospheric studies before, with contradictory conclusions, but the researchers say they’re the first to look at all of the painting’s whirls and eddies.
They looked at the 14 main swirls in the painting, and compared these with theories on energy and turbulent flows in the atmosphere.
“The scale of the paint strokes played a crucial role,” says author Associate Professor Yongxiang Huang, a researcher in fluid dynamics at Xiamen University, China.
“With a high-resolution digital picture, we were able to measure precisely the typical size of the brushstrokes and compare these to the scales expected from turbulence theories.”
As well as brush stroke size, the researchers also examined the “relative luminance” of paint colours used in the painting’s swirls.
They found that the picture aligned with a theory of turbulence called Kolmogorov’s Law, which predicts atmospheric movement based on measured inertia.
The changes in brightness reflect a process called Batchelor’s scaling, which describes how fluids diffuse at smaller scales.
“It reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena,” says Huang.
“Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky.”
