New Delhi, India

Vincent van Gogh's popular painting "The Starry Night" is widely celebrated for its artistic style, symbolism and for being a cultural icon. 

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Regarded as one of the greatest post-impressionist painters, scientists now have also determined that the crown jewel of Van Gogh's artwork is also scientifically accurate and abides closely by the laws of physics.  

According to experts in China and France who closely examined the picture, the "hidden turbulence" in the depiction of the night sky closely resembled that of the turbulence seen in nature. 

The painting prominently features a swirling blue sky with yellow moons and stars seen from Van Gogh's Saint-Remy-de-Provence asylum in southern France. Two cypress trees dominate the foreground on the left, while a village sits in the distance on the lower right.

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Van Gogh's Starry Night follows Kolmogorov’s law

The researchers concluded that the picture obeys Kolmogorov’s law, which predicts atmospheric movement and scale according to measured inertial energy.

“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,” said study co-author Yongxiang Huang of the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science at Xiamen University in China.

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Yongxiang stated that the Dutch master's work "reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena" which he probably would have learnt by studying the movement of clouds and atmosphere. 

The relative scale and spacing of his whirling brush strokes may have given the said effect. 

“Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky," Huang said.

The researchers also analysed the bright light-like reflections in the painting and discovered that it closely aligned with another Physics theory, Batchelor's scaling, which essentially describes the smallest fluctuations in turbulence before it dissipates. 

“Vincent van Gogh, as one of the most notable painters, had a very careful observation of turbulent flows: he was able to reproduce not only the size of whirls/eddies, but also their relative distance and intensity in his painting," the researcher wrote in the study.

(With inputs from agencies)