For more than a century, Vincent van Gogh's 1889 masterpiece was believed to be largely imagined, drawn from memory and sketches from his barred asylum bedroom window in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

Now researchers from South Korean space science company SLLAB and Kyung Hee University say the painting's crescent moon, Venus and stars closely match the actual pre-dawn sky over southern France on July 22, 1889.

The study, published in Scientific Reports, concludes the work 'did not invent a sky that was not there but transferred an observed arrangement onto canvas through stylistic amplification.'

Art historians, including the Museum of Modern Art, where the painting hangs, have long dated the work to mid-June 1889, based on a letter van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo around June 18 mentioning 'a new study of a starry sky.'

The researchers counter that in mid-June the moon was almost full, not the waning crescent depicted, and that near the summer solstice no impressive stars rise before dawn.

'Around July 22, by contrast, the Hyades rose in the east together with Venus, and the moon's shape was close to the crescent in the painting,' lead author Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim told CNN.

The researchers also re-examined original letters and weather records and suggest van Gogh's seizure may have occurred in late July and lasted only a day or two, reopening the timing window.

The team first used a separate van Gogh drawing to identify the hilly landscape southwest of the asylum, then simulated the sky there for every morning of June and July 1889.

Because a painter does not draw stars at their true size or orientation, the researchers used Procrustes shape analysis, which removes differences in position, size and rotation and compares only the shape of two sets of points.

That allowed them to closely match five stars in the painting's central arrangement with the Hyades cluster in Taurus, whose bright 'V' shape was visible to the naked eye. 'I was standing where Vincent had stood 130 years earlier,' Kim said, according to AOL.

The same method also mapped van Gogh's 1888 'Café Terrace at Night' onto the Summer Triangle.

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which was not involved in the research, maintains the painting was made in June 1889, on a canvas van Gogh received in early June, and that he sent Theo a drawing based on it on July 2.

'Van Gogh was not concerned with exact likenesses,' a museum spokesperson said, adding that the positions of celestial bodies 'cannot form a reliable basis for dating the work.'

According to AOL, physicist and astronomer Donald Olson also objects that Venus and the Hyades do not match their calculated positions in the painting and that the authors' narrow field of view is inconsistent with the wide view needed to show the painting's round hills.

Yongxiang Huang of Xiamen University, who was not involved, told CNN that 'astronomical alignments on a canvas must be interpreted with caution,' noting van Gogh 'was a Post-Impressionist master, not an optical camera.'

If the July date holds, the painting becomes evidence of observation rather than pure fantasy, and the history of van Gogh's medical crisis may need revising.

'If the date changes, the history books on his medical history need updating too,' said astronomer Ulrike Kuchner, who called the paper 'exciting detective work,' while noting the fundamental question of whether the work was spontaneous fantasy or realistic depiction is 'never really addressed.'

The study also follows 2024 research by Huang finding that the painting's swirls align with Kolmogorov's theory of turbulence, a fluid dynamics law, reinforcing a picture of van Gogh as an intuitive observer of nature.

Kim's team assumes van Gogh integrated observations of the sky over several nights, proposing the idea was conceived in June and the canvas completed after July 22.

The researchers acknowledge the results are not conclusive, noting the study is limited by 19th-century meteorological records that predate standardized observation, and that astronomy cannot determine when van Gogh began the work or whether he later reworked it.

Kim told CNN that finding more historical French weather records, or letters from van Gogh to other painters that mention 'The Starry Night,' could determine the creation date even more precisely.

He also noted the canvas has many bare areas where no paint was applied, which he personally believes fits a hurried completion, while stressing that suggestion is opinion rather than a study result. 'Now that the paper is out, I really have to go and see The Starry Night in person, don't I?'

Kim said, according to The Eagle, having never seen the painting at MoMA.