Van Gogh's Night Study
In January 2002, astronomers detected an explosion in a star named V838 Monocerotis located about 20,000 light-years away from Earth at the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy. The star remained one of the brightest objects in the Milky way until it faded away in April 2002. This brilliant explosion illuminated clouds of dust and gas around the star, which had remained invisible until the explosion. This illumination of the dust clouds is found to be expanding and is called a light echo by the astronomers.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured several pictures of the light echo since its appearance. But in February 2004, Hubble’s new image of this light echo revealed never-before-seen swirls of dust and gas around the star. The astronomers presumed that these eddies are caused due to the turbulence in the dust and gas since they are expanding. On a side-note, these swirls reminded them of Vincent Van Gogh’s famous work “The Starry Night” which is also always quoted with the adjective “turbulence”.
Van Gogh's Starry night is renowned for its apparent swirls on the sky that resembled natural turbulence. Turbulence is considered as one of the hardest unsolved problems by many physicists. Although we have the mathematical equations describing the flow of fluids that takes their origin directly from Newton’s laws, the non-linearity of the equation makes it terribly difficult to solve these for turbulent flows. This means that, given some initial conditions, we cannot predict the flow of fluid when it goes into turbulence.
In 2008, a team of physicists led by J.L. Aragón investigated the patterns of luminance in Van Gogh’s paintings. The team took digital images of some of the seemingly “turbulent” paintings of Van Gogh. They calculated the probability distribution function(PDF) of the luminance fluctuations in the paintings. (Basically, the probability that two pixels at a certain distance are at the same luminance.) Interestingly–and amusingly–the team found out that the calculated PDF is similar to the PDF of velocity differences of a turbulent flow as predicted by Kolmogrow’s theory to remarkable precision.
The problem of mathematically expressing the turbulent flow was one of the hardest and unsolved problems until Kolmogrow proposed his theory in the mid-twentieth century. Although Kolmogrow's theory is an approximation, that was a most significant achievement in fluid dynamics. This means the “turbulence” of Van Gogh’s paintings are physically the same as the turbulence of Jupiter’s atmosphere, the same as the turbulence found in cosmic clouds.
This similarity has been found only with the painting that was painted during the periods of Van Gogh’s psychotic agitation. Though irrational, maybe we could say that Van Gogh’s chaotic mind helped him to subconsciously model nature’s turbulence. But, all of this is clearly baseless speculation just because there would be no actual way to prove it. At the same time, believing it to be a coincidence would also be so unfair.