"Starry Night": a strange physical phenomenon was discovered in Van Gogh's famous masterpiece

After 135 years of creation, the world-famous masterpiece by iconic artist Vincent Van Gogh, "The Starry Night," reveals new secrets. A team of researchers has discovered that the swirling patterns in the painting actually reflect real atmospheric turbulence with amazing accuracy.

For many years, scientists have been thinking about how Van Gogh created a canvas in which the sky moves as if alive. Modern research has revealed that the Dutch post-impressionist painter captured more than just the beauty of the night - he may have unintentionally illustrated complex physical phenomena, StudyFinds writes.

Researchers from China and France, using artistic and scientific knowledge, decided to look into the most secret corners of the night sky in the painting "Starry Night" by the legendary artist Vincent Van Gogh.

"The scale of the strokes played a decisive role. With the help of high-resolution digital imaging, we were able to accurately measure the typical size of the strokes and compare them to the scale expected from turbulence theories," explained lead author Yongxiang Huang.

What is turbulence and how to use it in art

Turbulence is the chaotic movement of liquids or air. In the atmosphere, turbulence plays a crucial role in weather conditions and air mixing, and makes airplanes "jump" at altitude.

The researchers used several clever approaches to analyze Van Gogh's brushstrokes. They looked at the different brightness of the paint colors as a substitute for the energy of physical motion in the atmosphere. It's like watching leaves whirling in the wind to understand the wind itself.

Scientists have concluded that the patterns in the Starry Night painting are consistent with two important principles of fluid dynamics: Kolmogorov's law and Batchelor's scaling.

Scientists explain that Kolmogorov's law describes how energy moves from larger to smaller scales in turbulent flows. Here it is worth imagining a large whirlwind that breaks into smaller and smaller winds. This is what happens in the atmosphere and what Van Gogh's larger vortices seem to depict.

And Batchelor scaling refers to how small-scale turbulence behaves. The researchers found that the fine details of the legendary artist's brush strokes conform to this principle, which describes how substances such as heat or pollutants spread in a turbulent fluid.

According to experts, it is difficult to find both of these scientific approaches in one system. And the fact that a nineteenth-century artist could so accurately capture the complex dynamics of turbulence is impressive. "This opens up a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena. Van Gogh's accurate representation of turbulence may be the result of studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky," said Yongxiang Huang.

The team of scientists adds that Starry Night is still a work of fiction, not a scientific scheme. Nevertheless, this study opens up exciting possibilities for the intersection of art and science. It shows that beauty and scientific accuracy are not mutually exclusive - in fact, they may be more closely related than we realize.

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