Chasing stellar-mass black holes in our Galaxy.

Over the past decade, the advancement of large optical surveys and the emergence of gravitational wave observatories have opened a new pathway to finding and characterising black holes. These developments have led to new exciting insights on how black holes form and evolve. We are finding black holes in binary (and triple) configurations never observed before, and we are finding stellar-black holes in mass ranges that were deemed unfeasible. Alongside these revelations, new questions have emerged around how to interpret these findings, in the context of black hole formation and evolution and what they imply for the population of black holes in our Galaxy. 

In this talk, I'll review some of the recent discoveries, and showcase how they are shaping our journey in understanding black holes in our Galaxy.