Scientists may have matched Vincent van Gogh’s iconic “The Starry Night” to a specific celestial scene. Art historians long thought the painting depicted the sky in June 1889, when van Gogh was a patient at a psychiatric hospital in France’s Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, but new research challenges that date. A team of South Korean scientists says the painting actually shows a pre-dawn sky around July 22, 1889. Researchers traveled to France twice to analyze the sky in mid-June and late July. They also examined the moon’s shape and consulted historical weather records. “No two skies are the same. Something always changes,” lead researcher Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim told The Washington Post. “I believe Vincent noticed those changes and put them into the painting.” Still, some experts are more skeptical. Jose Luis Aragon, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who has also studied the painting, told the Post that he views it as an “intriguing hypothesis rather than a settled answer.”
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