Scientists using the Hubble space telescope discovered patterns of eddies and currents of dust around a distant star, and thought it looked a lot like Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting.

In digitizing and measuring the patterns in Van Gogh’s turbulent flows, they found the patterns of turbulent flow close to his end during a period of psychological difficulty closely matched Kolmogorov’s turbulent flow equations. Strangely, turbulent flow in his earlier paintings during a less troubled psychological time, did not exhibit this pattern.