The locations of features in the mass distribution of merging binary black holes are robust against uncertainties in the metallicity-dependent cosmic star formation history

Understand

New observational facilities are probing astrophysical transients such as stellar explosions and gravitational wave (GW) sources at ever increasing redshifts, while also revealing new features in source property distributions.

• To interpret these observations, we need to compare them to predictions from stellar population models.
• Such models require the metallicity-dependent cosmic star formation history ($\mathcal{S}(Z,z)$) as an input.
• Large uncertainties remain in the shape and evolution of this function.