Shedding light on the black hole mass spectrum

Understand

The mass spectrum of stellar black holes (BHs) is highly uncertain.

• Theoretical models of BH formation strongly depend on the efficiency of stellar winds of the progenitor star and on the supernova (SN) explosion mechanism.
• We discuss the BH mass spectrum we obtain using SEVN, a new public population-synthesis code that includes up-to-date stellar-wind prescriptions and several SN explosion models.
• Our models indicate a sub-solar metallicity environment for the progenitors of the gravitational wave source GW150914.