Gravito-magnetic vacuum spacetimes: kinematic restrictions

Abstract

We show that there are no vacuum solutions with a purely magnetic Weyl tensor with respect to an observer submitted to kinematic restrictions involving first order differential scalars. This result generalizes previous ones for the vorticity-free and shear-free cases. We use a covariant approach which makes evident that only the Bianchi identities are used and, consequently, the results are also valid for non vacuum solutions with vanishing Cotton tensor.