Van Gogh Yıldızlı Gece'nin Sırrı: 3 Seviyede İngilizce Haber

The Starry Night is a very famous painting. Vincent van Gogh painted it in 1889. Now some scientists say they know the real sky in it.

The team is from South Korea. Their study came out on October 22, 2026. They say the painting shows the early morning sky in France. The date is around July 22, 1889.

At that time, van Gogh was 36 years old. He lived in a hospital in Saint-Rémy. He was ill, and he looked at the sky from his window.

The scientists used special computer programs. They looked at every night sky in June and July 1889. In June, the moon was more than half full. In July, there was a thin moon above Venus. The weather on that night was also clear.

But not everyone agrees with the scientists. Van Gogh wrote letters to his brother Theo. In June, he said he finished a picture of a starry sky. The Van Gogh Museum says he was very ill in late July. He did not paint for about a month.

So the question is still open. Did he see the sky in June or July?

A team of astronomers from South Korea believes it has found the exact sky that inspired Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night. However, as Smithsonian Magazine reports, not everyone is convinced.

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports on October 22, 2026. It was led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, who runs a telescope company in Seoul and is also studying for a PhD at Kyung Hee University. According to the team, the painting matches the sky before dawn over Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, around July 22, 1889.

In the summer of 1889, van Gogh was 36 and staying in an asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he was recovering from several mental health crises. From his window, he looked out at the early morning sky.

To test their idea, the researchers used astronomy software to recreate every night sky of June and July 1889. They compared the positions of the stars, the crescent moon and Venus, but ignored size and colour because the artist may have exaggerated them. They also argue that the group of stars in the painting is the Hyades, a V-shaped cluster in the constellation Taurus. In mid-June the moon was more than half full, so it did not look like the thin crescent in the picture. Around July 22, however, the moon sat above Venus and the weather was clear.

Art historians, on the other hand, usually date the painting to June, because van Gogh told his brother Theo in a letter that he had finished a new study of a starry sky. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam also points out that he had a serious breakdown around July 22 and stopped painting for about a month. As a result, the debate is far from over.

The Starry Night is one of the most recognisable images in Western art, painted in 1889 while van Gogh, then 36, was recovering in an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Yet the swirling sky above the village has long kept its secrets. Now a team of South Korean astronomers claims to have pinned it down to a specific moment: the hours before dawn around July 22, 1889. Not everyone, however, is convinced.

The study, published in Scientific Reports on October 22, 2026, was a joint project between SLLAB, a Seoul telescope company, and Kyung Hee University's School of Space Research. Its lead author, Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, runs the company while completing a PhD. Using astronomy software, the team reconstructed every night sky of June and July 1889 and compared the positions of the stars, the crescent moon and Venus with those on the canvas. Size and colour were deliberately set aside, since van Gogh may well have exaggerated them. To measure how closely the painted stars resembled real patterns, the researchers turned to a statistical technique known as Procrustes shape analysis.

Their conclusion challenges earlier work that identified the star group as Aries, which Kim considers too faint at dawn to have caught a painter's eye. Instead, he argues, it is the Hyades, a V-shaped cluster in Taurus. In mid-June the moon was waning gibbous, hardly the slender crescent in the painting, whereas around July 22 the Hyades rose alongside Venus, the moon hung above the planet, and a weather analysis suggests the night was clear.

The trouble is that the documentary evidence points elsewhere. In a letter to his brother Theo in mid-June, van Gogh mentioned a new study of a starry sky, which is why art historians date the work to that month. Kim's answer is that the idea came in June and the painting was finished after July 22. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is unpersuaded: the artist, it says, did not try to paint exact likenesses, and a severe breakdown around that date kept him from painting for roughly a month.

Jose Luis Aragon, a physicist in Mexico who was not involved, offered a measured verdict to Smithsonian Magazine: the July date is an intriguing hypothesis rather than a settled answer. The more compelling point, in his view, is that van Gogh studied the real sky closely, and the painting is far from pure fantasy.