On the detection of eccentric supermassive black hole binaries with pulsar timing arrays

It is believed that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with masses between a million up to a few billion solar masses are ubiquitous in nearby galactic nuclei. Hence, the merger of a pair of galaxies hosting these compact objects may result in the formation of a compact binary that decays to small orbital separations via interactions with its stellar and gaseous environments. Recent studies suggest that these formation channels imply that SMBH binaries may have large orbital eccentricities when they become dominated by gravitational wave emission. In light of these considerations, we present a novel and comprehensive framework that we put at work to carry out an end-to-end analysis of the effect of eccentricity on the amplitude and spectrum of a stochastic, isotropic gravitational wave background from SMBH binaries and single resolvable sources that may be detected with Pulsar Timing Arrays.