For those who have ever wondered why the sky was a lurid red in The Scream - Edvard Munch's painting of modern angst - astronomers have an answer: a volcanic eruption half a world away.

An article published on Tuesday in Sky and Telescope pinpoints the location in Norway where Munch and his friends were walking when the artist saw the blood-red sky depicted in the 1893 painting, and offers an explanation for why it seemed to be aflame.

Donald Olson, a physics and astronomy professor at Texas State University, and his colleagues determined that debris thrown into the atmosphere by the massive eruption on the island of Krakatoa, in modern Indonesia, created vivid red twilights in Europe from November 1883 until February 1884.