Is The Starry Night Turbulent?

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. Kolmogorov’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 ( 1165×1165 pixels) of night sky in The Starry Night. We find a power spectrum, P(k) , where k is the wavevector, that shares the same features as supersonic turbulence. It has a power-law P(k)∝k−2.1±0.3 in the scaling range, 34≤k≤80 . We identify a driving scale, kD=3 , dissipation scale, kν=220 and a bottleneck. This leads us to believe that van Gogh’s depiction of the starry night closely resembles the turbulence found in real molecular clouds, the birthplace of stars in the Universe.