Hello, I'm Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
I'm in Edinburgh. I'm president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh based in George Street
They very rarely produce light, that's the
first thing to say. A few of them do
Most of them produce radio waves, and the radio waves swing round the sky as the
star spins, a bit like a lighthouse
sweeps a beam of light around
And every time the beam flashes across the earth, we see or hear a pulse of radio waves
so if you listen as you would listen to a
radio you hear pulse pulse pulse pulse
pulse pulse quite regularly and maybe
faster than that
They are basically radio pulses
Light is both a particle and a wave. 
Sometimes it behaves as a wave, sometimes
it behaves as a particle. As a rough rule of
thumb it travels as a wave, but when it
bumps into something it interacts and it behaves like a particle
I tend not to say what it is. I tend to say how it behaves because that's what we see as scientists
Mining a neutron star would be very interesting
I think we need to think a little bit about what we're doing and how
First of all the surface of the star
is probably as strong as steel
They're very unusual stars, so you have to think how you... well, you don't mine it do you?
You cut into it or something like that
Having got a chunk of it you also need
to know that a teaspoonful of typical
neutron star material weighs the same as
the seven billion people here on earth
so you don't really handle it in any
sense. It's seriously heavy
I don't think it's got interesting minerals or things like that in it, so it's not useful
in the way you could mine other
astronomical bodies, some other
astronomical bodies, but it's certainly
very interesting for its physics, because
it's so dense, so heavy, so compact
So contrasting to what a lot of people
think that scientists do, I don't typically spend
most of my time in a lab, in a lab coat kind of looking at things down the microscope
