Black Hole Mergers: What Gravitational Waves Reveal About Their Origins

In just one decade, gravitational-wave observatories have transformed black holes from theoretical curiosities into astrophysical laboratories. Observations of merging black holes now probe stellar evolution, compact-object formation and the environments in which binaries form and evolve, offering a data-driven view of how massive stars live, interact and ultimately collapse.

In this Presidential Lecture, Vicky Kalogera will examine how gravitational-wave observations constrain the masses and spins of merging black holes and what these measurements imply about the black holes’ astrophysical origins. Population-level inferences point to multiple formation channels and encode the imprint of massive stellar evolution, binary interactions and core collapse. The talk will place these results in the context of a growing multi-messenger picture and discuss how they are shaping an emerging, physically grounded understanding of black-hole formation. Finally, Kalogera will briefly describe how new computational and AI-enabled approaches are expanding the scope and reach of theoretical modeling of stars and compact objects, transforming future population studies.