While we find "The Starry Night" by Vincent van Gogh breathtaking (or not), scientists keep looking at it for quite different reasons.
It turns out that a swirling blue sky is more than just captivating brush strokes. Scientists now believe that the masterpiece, painted at the end of the 19th century, demonstrates the Dutch painter's deep understanding of natural phenomena.
Yinxiang Ma, Wanting Cheng, Shidi Huang, François G. Schmitt, Xin Lin, and Yongxiang Huang delved into their findings in the article "Hidden Turbulence in van Gogh's The Starry Night," recently published in the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal Physics of Fluids.
"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," Yongxiang Huang said.
The group of French and Chinese scientists examined the painting's whirling shapes and concluded that they align with the cascading energy theory.
The latter describes how energy transfers from large-scale to smaller ones until it dissipates as heat.
"Van Gogh had a very careful observation of real flows, so that not only the sizes of whirls/eddies in The Starry Night but also their relative distances and intensity follow the physical law that governs turbulent flows," the article reads.
The original painting of "The Starry Night" by Vincent van Gogh is currently housed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
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