Accelerated Bayesian Searches for Gravitational Waves from Eccentric Binary Systems

Abstract

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) can detect low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) by searching for correlations in the residuals of pulse arrival times. Among the many interesting sources of these GWs are individual supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs). Performing a full Bayesian inference of individual GW sources with PTA data is a computationally intensive and often prohibitive task due to the large parameter spaces, complicated deterministic signal modeling, and parameter covariances. Recently methods have been developed to speed up the analysis of GWs from circular SMBHBs by separating the parameter space in shape and projection parameters, and effectively marginalizing over parameters whose updates incur very little computational cost in the model likelihood. We extend these methods to a pipeline for eccentric SMBHB sources, and present its accuracy in recovering GW signal parameters in simulated data. We also test the scalability of this method to future larger datasets, and discuss what changes can be made for future analyses.