Van Gogh's paintings contain surprisingly accurate physics knowledge.

Analysis of the brushstrokes and colors in "Starry Night" reveals striking similarities to underlying fluctuations in the Earth's atmosphere, demonstrating Van Gogh's intimate understanding of natural processes.

There's more to this famous painting by Vincent van Gogh than meets the eye, a new study says.

Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is one of the most famous paintings in the world. (Photo: Andrew Chin/ Getty Images).

Analyzing the brushstrokes and colors in the painting, researchers discovered that the turbulent swirling sky shares many characteristics with invisible dynamic processes occurring in the Earth's atmosphere.

Van Gogh painted this painting in June 1889 while he was living in a mental asylum in southern France while recovering from a mental breakdown that had led to him injuring his own ear six months earlier.

The masterpiece " Starry Night" is painted in oil and shows a swirling sky seen from his bedroom window, with an imaginary village added to the foreground. The work is known for its detailed brushstrokes and use of bright colors.

Chinese researchers have noticed similarities between the swirling shapes in the painting and the dynamic forms of liquid and gas movement . They have taken a closer look at this painting.

In a paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids, the team analyzed every tiny detail of the painting's brushstrokes and colors and found that both of these elements have very similar characteristics to the turbulence of gases in the atmosphere.

"The analysis shows that the painters had a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena," said study co-author and oceanographer Huang Yongyang of Xiamen University in China .

The accurate representation of that turbulence may come from studying the motion of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamical nature of the sky."

Van Gogh painted this painting while looking out the window of his room in a mental asylum in the south of France. The village in the foreground is his imagination. (Photo: Getty Images).

The researchers specifically analyzed the 14 "swirls" in the sky of the painting and found that these shapes all followed the patterns predicted by Kolmogorov's fundamental law of variation.

Kolmogorov's law is a physical rule that describes how gases in the atmosphere move at different rates depending on their inertial energy.

In this painting, the inertial energy is represented by the intensity of the yellow colors used by the artist.

Digging deeper, they also found that the spacing and weight of each stroke is related to the Batchelor ratio . In fluid and molecular dynamics, the Batchelor ratio describes the size of vortices and droplets before they dissolve in a turbulent fluid.

However, Kolmogorov and Batchelor formulated these laws decades after the artist's death. So it is certain that Van Gogh did not use his knowledge of fluid dynamics, but rather drew inspiration from general observations of the sky or natural vortices.

Likewise, the connection between energy and yellow is also a coincidence but comes from the artist's instinctive feeling.

Researchers analyzed the spacing and weight of the strokes in each swirling vortex in the painting's sky (Photo: Yinxiang Ma).

But it is clear that the work "Starry Night" stimulates associations with processes taking place in the natural world.

In 2020, researchers named a new species of spider after this painting due to the similarity between the painting's swirls of color and the glowing dots on the body of the newly discovered spider.

In 2021, microbiologists also noticed a striking resemblance between the iconic swirls in the painting and swarms of mutant bacteria.

In May 2024, new images sent back from Jupiter by NASA's Juno probe also showed swirling storms in Jupiter's northern hemisphere that look very similar to Van Gogh's paintings.

These billowing clouds are also associated with turbulent patterns in Jupiter's atmosphere, similar to those on Earth.