Scientists have made a surprising revelation about Vincent van Gogh ’s 1889 painting ‘The Starry Night’ – and claim that it does not depict neither the stars or the night that we thought.

Researchers used a variety of techniques to establish the night sky that the painting actually depicts and claim that it shows the pre-dawn sky over Saint-Rémy around 22 July 1889.

Astronomers have been trying to understand the painting through their understanding of the night sky for years, with two major studies produced in the mid-1980s. But they came to conflicting conclusions, and viewers have tended instead to focus on the symbolic interpretations of the painting.

But the new work was inspired by seeing the painting and finding the prevailing understanding of which part of the sky it depicts unsatisfactory, said its lead author.

“To an observational astronomer, the cluster of stars in The Starry Night is the Hyades in Taurus,” said Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, a PhD candidate at Kyung Hee University in South Korea .…