Black hole demography at the dawn of gravitational-wave astronomy: state of the art and future perspectives

Understand

The first LIGO-Virgo detections have confirmed the existence of massive black holes (BHs), with mass $30-40$ M$_\odot$.

• Such BHs might originate from massive metal-poor stars ($Z<0.3$ Z$_\odot$) or from gravitational instabilities in the early Universe.
• The formation channels of merging BHs are still poorly constrained.
• The measure of mass, spin and redshift distribution of merging BHs will give us fundamental clues to distinguish between different models.