The beautiful spirals and curls in Van Gogh's Starry Night are very similar not only to the exact mathematical description of turbulent air flows in the Earth's atmosphere, but also to the supersonic vortices of gas and dust in the “starry nursery”. This is the conclusion reached by scientists who published an article in the arXiv.org electronic library.
This painting by Van Gogh, as connoisseurs of his work today believe, was painted by the great impressionist in June 1889, right after he cut off his earlobe and was admitted to the hospital for the mentally ill in the town of Saint-Remy-de-Provence. Now it is kept in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is considered one of the most famous masterpieces of the Dutchman.
According to legend, the painting depicts those parts of the sky that were visible from his bedroom during the next exacerbation of his mental problems in the spring of 1899. Such statements have repeatedly forced both astronomers and physicists to study Starry Night in detail, hoping to verify such statements and understand what exactly Van Gogh wanted to tell us.
This search led to an extremely interesting and unexpected discovery. Ten years ago, as noted by James Beattie of the National University of Australia in Canberra and Neco Kriel of the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Mexican scientists noticed that the beautiful spirals and coils in Van Gogh's night sky looked like turbulent air streams.
They checked whether this is actually the case using a set of formulas and mathematical principles that the famous Soviet mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov derived in 1941 to describe turbulence. As it turned out, Van Gogh's picture really matched them, and now physicists, chemists and even biologists often try to "copy" it, using various turbulent processes that arise in their experiments.
Australian astronomers have discovered another curious quality of "Starry Night" associated with turbulence, having studied this picture in more detail than their Mexican colleagues did. They tried to compare it with Kolmogorov's calculations as honestly as possible, breaking the picture by color and tracing the formation of chaotic, fractal waves in each of its "copies".
By counting their number and analyzing their shape, astronomers figured out how the energy was distributed inside these vortices. As it turned out, these measurements were almost identical for all "copies" of Van Gogh's painting, and at the same time they fit well with the predictions of Kolmogorov's theory.
In other words, the curls in the night sky of the Starry Night very well repeated how real turbulent air currents interact with the light of distant stars, galaxies and nebulae, causing them to “blink” and tremble almost imperceptibly.
Promotional video:
Moreover, further analysis of these curves shows that they are more reminiscent not of chaotic air flows in the Earth's atmosphere, but of supersonic turbulent flows of gas and dust arising in "stellar nurseries" in the Milky Way and in other galaxies. This, the researchers conclude, makes the Dutch impressionist masterpiece even more interesting to scientists.