A comment on a paper by Dadhich and Patel (Q1289221)

In a recent paper [ibid. 29, 179-183 (1997; Zbl 0878.53062)], \textit{N. Dadhich} and \textit{L. K. Patel} proved the following result: a shear-free expanding perfect fluid spacetime admitting a diagonal metric with orthogonally transitive abelian \(G_2\) group of isometries must either be Friedmann-Robertson-Walker or plane symmetric. From the orthogonal transitivity of the group of motions it follows that the fluid flow is hypersurface orthogonal. In this note it is shown that the symmetry assumption is not actually necessary and that the hypersurface orthogonality of the fluid flow suffices to prove a similar, but more general, result. More specifically, the following result is valid: shear-free, hypersurface orthogonal and expanding perfect fluid flows admit a \(G_3(2s)\) group of isometries (i.e., a three-dimensional group acting on two-dimensional spacelike orbits) or are conformally flat.