Colloquium – Barry McKernan

Barry McKernan, City University of New York

The importance of things in agn disks

We are living in a golden age for gravitational wave detection of low mass binary black holes (BBH). BBH can occur in multiple different channels (e.g. massive stellar binaries, star clusters). In this talk I will explain the active galactic nuclei (AGN) channel for BBH mergers, why and how we think it happens and what we can learn from it. I’ll also briefly discuss EM signatures that might be associated with things in, around and interacting with AGN disks and will conclude with some future directions and open questions.

Bio: Barry McKernan is a Professor at City University of New York (BMCC & the Graduate Center), a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Computational Astrophysics. Prof. McKernan is the co-developer of the AGN channel for BBH mergers and a lead developer of McFACTS, the first public, open-source, complete AGN channel pop synth code. https://github.com/McFACTS/McFACTS

September 25, 2025 @ 4:10pm (CST) in 4327 Stevenson Center; light refreshments available at 3:50 PM

Host: S Taylor