\u201cThis study shows that the sky depicted in The Starry Night corresponds observationally and geometrically with the actual dawn sky around July 22,\u201d Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim<\/a>, the study\u2019s first author and the founder of SLLAB<\/a>, a South Korean astronomy startup, told Gizmodo (self-translated from Korean). \u201cSo, we suggest that van Gogh ideated his work in June and completed it after July 22.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond academic boundaries <\/p>\n The latest work isn\u2019t the first time that astronomers and physicists made The Starry Night the subject of their scientific pursuits. To give a recent example, in 2024 Chinese physicists argued<\/a> that the painting\u2019s iconic swirls showed van Gogh had a deep, intuitive understanding<\/a> of natural phenomena like turbulence. But even earlier, influential scholars like art historian Albert Boime<\/a> and astrophysicist Charles A. Whitney<\/a> seriously<\/a> considered<\/a> the possibility that the painting represented a (stylistic) depiction of an actual night sky.<\/p>\n It was these two studies\u2014published in the 1980s\u2014that proposed the date of June 1889, although this was soon contested by others in the field. As a result, according to the latest paper, this \u201cobservational reading has since remained a marginal minority view\u201d and thus was never \u201cquantitatively tested.\u201d<\/p>\n When the stars align <\/p>\n Vincent\u2019s \u201ccall\u201d to Kim, as he put it, first came when he encountered previous work arguing that The Starry Night depicted the constellation Aries. That seemed off to Kim, who had spent most of his career developing celestial telescopes. As he explained to Gizmodo, this means you consistently witness the moment a telescope syncs with the night sky for the first time, and from that you inevitably memorize the positions of each star.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd to me, the lights of The Starry Night looked more like the Hyades star cluster in the constellation Taurus,\u201d he explained. \u201cBut that conflicted with the consensus that van Gogh suffered seizures mid-July, which was why the study became multidisciplinary\u2014I had to reference different tools to track down what his life was like.\u201d<\/p>\n For the latest work, Kim and his colleagues first established a framework based on astronomical simulations, astrometric reconstructions, and Procrustes fitting, or a geometric technique to quantify the reliability of an identified pattern\u2014like that of a constellation. Before returning to van Gogh, the team applied its framework on other paintings from the early 17th century, as well as other paintings by van Gogh depicting the night sky in 1888.<\/p>\n Then, using earlier sketches of the terrain seen in the final version of The Starry Night, the team estimated van Gogh\u2019s narrow field of view from his studio. And all the evidence\u2014the field of view, historical records on positions of the Moon, Venus, stars, and the weather\u2014are all consistent with the dawn of July 22, 1889, according to the study. Importantly, these are all \u201cmutually independent\u201d constraints.<\/p>\n Art and observation <\/p>\n In other words, it\u2019s too good of a coincidence to assume that The Starry Night\u2019s sky was an arbitrary creation as opposed to a stylized\u2014yet realistic\u2014depiction of what van Gogh actually observed. To be fair, van Gogh himself described his work as \u201cexaggerations from the point of view of the arrangement,\u201d but the team added that an exaggeration \u201cpresupposes a real object to amplify.\u201d<\/p>\n That said, the \u201ccorrection,\u201d so to speak, is arguably a minor one. It\u2019s just a one-month difference. However, art historians have previously pointed out that the rest of van Gogh\u2019s paintings from June were notably different from The Starry Night, Kim explained. Until now, that would have been another case against the astronomical interpretation of the painting. But with the new date, the \u201cburden of explanation now reverses,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n The life of a painter <\/p>\n But the observational matches alone \u201ccan\u2019t irrefutably determine the completion date\u201d for the painting,\u201d Kim said, adding that van Gogh most likely compiled different observations over several days for his piece. The team also ran into several limitations as a result of incomplete or ambiguous meteorological records from the 19th century. Researchers have yet to find firm clinical proof on van Gogh\u2019s seizure, either, so the conclusions of the study may shift should new historical sources come to light.<\/p>\n Having said that, the new work importantly shows that it\u2019s possible for \u201cforensic astronomy\u201d to convert \u201cart-historical interpretation into physically testable propositions,\u201d according to the paper. Kim added that follow-up investigations will continue to explore this relationship for van Gogh\u2019s other works.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d say that van Gogh and the stars had an inseparable relationship,\u201d Kim said. That\u2019s quite evident in his letters to Theo, his brother. Since at least the spring of 1888, Vincent van Gogh\u2019s thoughts were \u201cfilled with stars,\u201d Kim explained, and it may be this passion that spoke to astronomers like himself, Kim said, that led to scientists answering van Gogh\u2019s call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a surprisingly long time, scientists have debated whether Vincent van Gogh\u2019s The Starry Night was his fantasy,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":942390,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[56252,800,3508,49,48,66,306],"class_list":["post-942389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-art-history","tag-astronomy","tag-astrophysics","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=942389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/942390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=942389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=942389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=942389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Van](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/van-gogh-starry-night-star-patterns-1280x593.jpg\")
A comparison between known star positions and van Gogh\u2019s paintings, The Starry Night (top left) and Caf\u00e9 Terrace at Night (bottom left). \u00a9 Kim et al., 2026 <\/p>\n