A fresh look at Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night suggests the painter captured the sky over Saint-Rémy, France, just before sunrise on July 22, 1889—settling a question astronomers have debated for decades.
Scientists have made a surprising discovery regarding The Starry Night, the world-renowned painting created by Vincent van Gogh in 1889. According to scientists, this painting depicts the sky as it appeared before sunrise on July 22, 1889.
Using various scientific methods, researchers sought to determine exactly what celestial scene is portrayed in the painting. They concluded that it reflects the sky over Saint-Rémy, France, as it appeared before sunrise around July 22, 1889.
For years, astronomers have attempted to interpret the painting by drawing upon their knowledge of the night sky. Two significant studies emerged in the mid-1980s, though they yielded conflicting results. Consequently, observers began to focus more on the symbolic meaning of the celestial scene rather than its scientific interpretation.
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According to the lead author of this new research, the idea for the study arose when he examined the painting and found the existing interpretations of the depicted sky to be unsatisfactory.
Elijah Jeong-Hyun Kim, a PhD student at Kyung Hee University in South Korea, noted that from the perspective of an observational astronomer, the cluster of stars in The Starry Night appears to be the Hyades, located in the constellation Taurus. However, upon reading that previous research had identified them as belonging to the constellation Aries, he felt as though the painting was beckoning him.
Researchers successfully pinpointed the location where the painting was created. They then analyzed the shapes depicted in the work to verify whether the five prominent central stars corresponded to the stars present in the sky that night.
According to the researchers, a pen-and-ink sketch that Van Gogh produced after creating this famous painting aligns even more closely with the state of the sky on that particular night.
The findings add to a growing list of sky-watching stories with a scientific twist—whether it is Pakistan’s first astronaut preparing for a historic space journey from China, researchers revealing the mystery behind a strange cloud appearing on Mars, or bigger questions about the world in 2030 and the alarming decline of human freedom. Even a painting made more than a century ago can still teach us something about the sky above us.
