Washington — President Trump signed a presidential memorandum Monday mobilizing federal law enforcement agents to Memphis, Tennessee, as a part of a task force that will include the Tennessee National Guard, the latest planned Guard deployment in his effort to combat crime in U.S. cities. 

“The effort will include the National Guard as well as the FBI, ATF, DEA, ICE, Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S, Marshals,” the president said Monday, adding that the task force will be a “replica” of the efforts in Washington, D.C. 

Mr. Trump said he went ahead with the memo “at the request” of Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who was in the Oval Office for the signing. Specifically, the memo directs the defense secretary to ask the governor to make the Tennessee National Guard available to help federal law enforcement. 

“They’re a volunteer state,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday. “We’re not going to have any problems with the Tennessee National Guard.” 

The move makes Memphis the third city to see National Guard troops on its streets under Mr. Trump’s presidency, following deployments in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., earlier this year. 

“We’re going to be doing Chicago probably next,” the president said Monday, adding that “we’re going to wait a little while” before going into the country’s third-largest city. 

The president said St. Louis may also be a city that will see a federal law enforcement presence. 

“We have to save St. Louis. We have to save Chicago,” he said in the Oval Office on Monday. 

Mr. Trump has said authorities will “straighten out” Memphis. The president said a person is four times more likely to be killed in Memphis than Mexico City. 

On Sunday, the president wrote on Truth Social that federal law enforcement has been on the ground in Memphis for the last five months, but “the real work by us has barely begun.”

“The only reason crime is somewhat down in Memphis is because the FBI, and others in the Federal Government, at my direction, have been working there for 5 months – on the absolutely terrible Crime numbers,” he wrote. “Likewise, in Chicago and Los Angeles! But the real work by us has barely begun. That happens after we make the official announcement that WE’RE COMING, and when we do that, as we did in now VERY SAFE WASHINGTON, D.C., the no crime ‘miracle’ begins. ONLY I CAN SAVE THEM!!!”

While some governors have shunned the idea of the National Guard posting up in their cities, Lee has been open to the idea of the National Guard deploying in his state. Lee said he’s been in “constant communication” with the Trump administration for months on an anti-crime plan, and the “next phase will include a comprehensive mission with the Tennessee National Guard, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Tennessee Highway Patrol, Memphis Police Department, and other law enforcement agencies.”

Democratic Memphis Mayor Paul Young said in a press conference that he didn’t ask for the National Guard to come, but he’ll work with them to “strategize on how they engage in this community.” 

The president’s decision to send more than 2,000 National Guard troops to the Los Angeles area this spring prompted an ongoing legal fight. A federal judge ruled earlier this month that the deployment violated a federal law that prohibits the use of the military for law enforcement actions on U.S. soil.

In Washington, hundreds of National Guard troops have been patrolling streets and cleaning up the city in “beautification” efforts since Mr. Trump ordered their deployment over the summer. The troops are not engaged in law enforcement functions, but their presence coincided with the president federalizing the local police force and surging federal agents into the capital to crack down on crime.

The president has floated other cities that could be the next target of his campaign against urban crime, including Chicago, New York and San Francisco. But he has also said he wants governors and residents of cities to support the presence of troops and law enforcement.

Illinois officials have made it clear they don’t want the National Guard there. 

“We don’t need or want you here, Donald,” said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson recently wrote in the New York Times that “[s]ending in the National Guard is the wrong solution to a real problem.”

Science advances through data that don’t fit our current understanding. At least that was Thomas Kuhn’s theory in his famous On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So scientists should welcome new data that challenges their understanding of how the universe works. A recent paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might just had found some data that can do that. It looked at an exoplanet around a millisecond pulsar and found its atmosphere is made up of almost entirely pure carbon.

This type of pulsar, PSR J2322-2650, is known as a “black widow” system, as it powers its high energy outbursts by stealing material from a neighboring star. In this case, that neighboring star has likely been degraded to a “hot Jupiter” companion planet that orbits its parent neutron star every 7.8 hours. A typical “black widow” formation process has two steps – one where the neutron star (which in this case is also a pulsar) steals the material, and a second step where it blasts its companion with high energy gamma radiation, ripping off most of the companion star’s outer layers and resulting in a Jupiter-sized exoplanet composed mainly of helium.

The exoplanet around PSR J2322-2650, known as PSR J2322-2650b, does fit the description of a Jupiter-sized planet that seems to have the same density as what would be expected if it was made up primarily of helium. However, its atmosphere is unlike any other black widow companion ever seen. According to the spectrographic reports from JWST, its atmosphere is composed mainly of elemental carbon, taking the form of tricarbon (C3) or dicarbon (C2).

Fraser discusses pulsars and how they form.

Usually those types of elements are found in the tails of comets, or in actual flames here on Earth. Their presence in a planet’s atmosphere, especially in such abundant quantities, is new to science.

Another interesting thing about the planet’s atmosphere is the difference between the day and night side. On the dayside, which is always facing the pulsar since the planet is tidally locked, temperatures can reach above 2000 ℃ and there are very clear chemical signatures. However, on the night side, there were almost no features at all, suggesting that side of the planet is covered in soot or something similar that doesn’t have any distinct features.

To further prove how strange this planet’s atmosphere is, the researchers calculated the ratios between carbon and oxygen as well as carbon and nitrogen. The C/O ratio was over 100, while the C/N ratio was over 10,000. In comparison, the Earth has a C/O ratio of .01 and a C/N ratio of 40. Obviously, there’s a lot of carbon on this planet.

And that doesn’t fit well with models of how scientists thought the planet should form. As part of the “black widow” process, the outer layers of the planet should have been either siphoned up by the companion star or burned away by that star’s radiation. The fact that such a rich carbon atmosphere still exists remains a mystery. There are processes that can create such an atmosphere, such as a white-dwarf merger between who “carbon stars”, but even that falls short of explaining how the planet’s C/O ratio got so high.

Fraser discusses black widow pulsars and an interesting theory behind their formation.

Other aspects of the planet align with general theory though. Circulation models predict that rapidly rotating planets, like PSR J2322-2650b, would have strong westerly winds, which is different from the typical easterly winds on other tidally locked hot Jupiters. The JWST data show that the hottest part of the planet is about 12 degrees west of center, providing the first ever observational evidence of this western wind phenomena.

In other words, PSR J2322-2650b is contradictory. It’s the right size and shape for a typical black widow pulsar system. Its window circulation also fits well with our best models. But its atmosphere is something else entirely, and scientists will have to go back to the theory to try to find a way to make it make sense with the new data. While they’re busy doing that, JWST will continue scanning the sky for more anomalies that could drive the next scientific revolution.

Learn More:

M. Zhang et al – A carbon-rich atmosphere on a windy pulsar planet

UT – Astronomers Scan 800 Pulsars to See If Any of Them Have Planets

UT – Planets Orbiting Pulsars Should Have Strange and Beautiful Auroras. And We Could Detect Them

UT – Astronomers Weigh a Pulsar’s Planets