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Understanding how black holes form and grow across cosmic time is a major open challenge in astrophysics. Recent JWST discoveries of candidate active galactic nuclei at z≳10 provide new constraints on early black hole assembly.
In this talk, I present a unified framework in which black hole seeds span a continuous mass spectrum shaped by environmental conditions.
I discuss the physical processes driving their growth, including super-Eddington accretion in gas-rich environments, and their impact on the evolving black hole population. Finally, I show how combining JWST observations and gravitational-wave detections can distinguish between different formation pathways and constrain black hole evolution across cosmic history.