TAPIR Seminar
The first two observing runs of advanced LIGO and Virgo have resulted in ten binary black hole (BBH) detections, allowing us to probe various properties of the underlying BBH population. In this talk, I will discuss what we have learned so far about the mass, spin, and redshift distributions of BBHs. The features in these distributions, including evidence for a maximum black hole mass at ~ 45 solar masses and a preference for merger rates that increase with redshift, are starting to inform our knowledge of BBH formation and evolution. With tens to hundreds of additional detections in the next few years, constraints on the mass spectrum, spin distribution, and the merger rate as a function of redshift will further discriminate between different models of BBH formation.