Progenitors of heavy black holes from stellar evolution

As such, understanding their formation has been a multi- disciplinary effort involving theory, computations and observations. With the detection of GW190521 providing the largest stellar mass black hole merger progenitors in the GW catalogues, many theories were discussed in order to test or verify the reasons behind these unexpectedly large objects.

Furthermore, with the ever increasing sensitivity of modern GW detectors, the promise of more detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), and the expectation of observations from Pair Instability Supernovae and their progenitors with satellites such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Euclid, it is important - now more than ever - to develop physically consistent systematic theoretical models of what the astronomical community can expect from these massive, and very massive stars.<br><br>In this thesis, I systematically explore the massive and very massive star parameter space across a range of different initial conditions with the aim of providing a consistent set of predictions which can be used to validate theory in the presence of current and upcoming observations.