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Advanced LIGO detectors at Hanford and Livingston made two confirmed and onemarginal detection of binary black holes during their first observing run. Thefirst event, GW150914, was from the merger of two black holes much heavier thatthose whose masses have been estimated so far, indicating a formation scenariothat might differ from "ordinary" stellar evolution. One possibility is thatthese heavy black holes resulted from a previous merger. When the progenitorsof a black hole binary merger result from previous mergers, they should (onaverage) merge later, be more massive, and have spin magnitudes clusteredaround a dimensionless spin ~0.7. Here we ask the following question: cangravitational-wave observations determine whether merging black holes were bornfrom the collapse of massive stars ("first generation"), rather than being theend product of earlier mergers ("second generation")? We construct simple,observationally motivated populations of black hole binaries, and we useBayesian model selection to show that measurements of the masses, luminositydistance (or redshift), and "effective spin" of black hole binaries can indeeddistinguish between these different formation scenarios.

Are merging black holes born from stellar collapse or previous mergers?