After six months of hard work, science students from Monmouth School, St Albans RC High School and Newent Community School finished building their radio astronomy equipment, just in time to measure the largest explosions on the Sun for many years.

The project is part of the Monmouth Science Initiative (MSI), operates weekly in the physics department and is supervised by Dr David Morgan from British Aerospace. The first of several Very Low Frequency radio receivers, which are capable of detecting the effect of violent X ray bursts from the Sun, was set up at Monmouth Boys School last week. It has already captured major solar eruptions, capable of damaging satellites in space, power grids and computers on the Earth.

Solar storms cause ionised layers in the Earth’s upper atmosphere to buckle, which affects VLF radio transmissions. These storms also cause the Northern Lights and dramatically disturb the Earth’s magnetic field. As the Sun is ‘waking up’ after years of low activity in its 11 year Sun Spot cycle, the sixth form students can look forward to recording the behaviour of our nearest star for years to come

Dr Keith Moseley, Head of Physics at Monmouth School, commented: “We timed it just right and captured a major solar event – the students have learned a lot and the experience will help with their future scientific careers”