Astronomers unlock a mystery hidden in van Gogh’s The Starry Night

Researchers say they’ve identified the constellation depicted in Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night—and that the discovery changes what historians have assumed about the timing of the artwork’s creation.

The painting, now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, is said to date back to mid-June 1889, when van Gogh was in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in France. But astronomers seeking to use the painting’s stars to pin down the exact time and place it was created have reached conflicting conclusions.

In a paper published on October 22 in Scientific Reports, researchers identified the stars in The Starry Night as those of the V-shaped Hyades cluster within the Taurus constellation, as observed on July 22, 1889.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

“To my eyes, the star cluster in The Starry Night was the Hyades in Taurus. But earlier studies explained it as Aries,” says space researcher Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, who is first author of the paper. “At that moment, I was sure this painting was worth studying.”

To find the constellation in The Starry Night, the researchers used a software program called Procrustes, which looked for patterns based on the shape formed by the relative positions of a group of stars rather than likely artistic embellishments such as size or color. This “shape analysis” technique matched five stars in the painting with five stars in the Hyades cluster, which had the strongest statistical fit out of any of the alternative constellations tested, including Aries, which had previously been proposed to be the constellation in the center of the painting. The researchers also tested this method on a van Gogh painting with a known constellation in it, the Big Dipper in Starry Night over the Rhône, and found its match had a comparably strong result to that of The Starry Night and Hyades.

To bolster their case, Kim and his colleagues looked to evidence from van Gogh’s letters at the time he was working on The Starry Night to show that perhaps he had painted it in several sessions, with the stars being observed from late July. Although van Gogh mentioned “a new study” of the starry sky in a June 18, 1889, letter, the researchers say that doesn’t mean he had finished the painting. Van Gogh’s letters also make no mention of Aries, despite his regular references to observing Venus, which was close to that constellation in the sky. “The stars of Aries are relatively faint, hardly enough to inspire a painter” at dawn, Kim says, which was when van Gogh often watched the stars.

Another argument against a mid-June date for The Starry Night is the lunar cycle—at that time, the moon would have been in a waning gibbous phase, with its sunlit side appearing as a lopsided oval. Yet the painting shows a waning crescent moon, as it would have been in a late-July sky. Kim also visited Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in June and July 2019 to fully capture van Gogh’s field of view from the precise location where he painted The Starry Night. Kim’s observations there, he says, further confirm the match with the Hyades cluster.

“During this time, van Gogh’s view of the sky was quite restricted” from his window at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole mental asylum, says James Beattie, a Hubble fellow at NASA. “If the identification holds, we can look up today and recognize the same stars van Gogh saw.”

Despite the study’s thoroughness, of course, for a painting as iconic as The Starry Night, there will always be competing versions of an origin story.

“The calculated position of brilliant Venus, in relation to the V shape of the Hyades asterism, does not match the painting,” says Don Olson, a self-proclaimed “celestial sleuth” for astronomical artwork and a professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at Texas State University. The researchers’ conclusions “require strong evidence to overcome Vincent van Gogh’s plain statement that ‘at last I have... a new study of a starry sky’ ... on June 18, 1889.”

Although there are still mysteries to resolve, Kim says the burden of proof has now reversed to proving the painting could not have been made in late July.

“The Starry Night spoke to an astronomer like me,” Kim says. “I listened to its voice.”