Career
He is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University. Lattimer has made a number of fundamental contributions to the field of nuclear astrophysics, with a particular focus on neutron stars. One of his biggest impacts was modeling the birth of neutron stars from supernovae in 1986 with then-research assistant professor Adam Burrows.
This came just six months before the closest supernova in modern history (SN 1987A, in the LMC).
Their paper predicted the signature of neutrinos from supernovae that was subsequently validated by neutrino observations, from SN 1987A on February 23, 1987. In work that led to his Doctor of Philosophy thesis, Lattimer and his advisor David North. Schramm first argued that the mergers of neutron stars and black holes would result in the ejection of neutron-rich matter in sufficient quantities to explain the origin of r-process elements such as gold and platinum.
Later, with collaborators, he demonstrated decompressing neutron-star matter from both neutron star-black hole and neutron star-neutron star mergers would form a natural r-process that would match observed patterns. More recently, Lattimer and collaborators suggested that the recently observed rapid cooling of the neutron star in the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant is the first direct evidence for superfluidity and superconductivity in neutron star interiors.
