Is The Starry Night Turbulent?
James Beattie, Neco Kriel

TL;DR
This paper analyzes Van Gogh's The Starry Night to determine if its swirling patterns resemble real turbulence in space, finding that the power spectrum of the painting's night sky shares characteristics with supersonic turbulence in molecular clouds.
Contribution
It introduces a novel method of analyzing art through turbulence theory, revealing that The Starry Night's sky mimics the turbulence observed in astrophysical phenomena.
Findings
Power spectrum follows a k^{-2.1} law similar to supersonic turbulence.
Identifies a driving scale at k=3 and dissipation at k=220.
The painting's patterns resemble turbulence in star-forming regions.
Abstract
Vincent van Gogh's painting, The Starry Night, is an iconic piece of art and cultural history. The painting portrays a night sky full of stars, with eddies (spirals) both large and small. \cite{Kolmogorov1941}'s description of subsonic, incompressible turbulence gives a model for turbulence that involves eddies interacting on many length scales, and so the question has been asked: is The Starry Night turbulent? To answer this question, we calculate the azimuthally averaged power spectrum of a square region ( pixels) of night sky in The Starry Night. We find a power spectrum, , where is the wavevector, that shares the same features as supersonic turbulence. It has a power-law in the scaling range, . We identify a driving scale, , dissipation scale, and a…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSolar and Space Plasma Dynamics
