A new class of obstructions to the smoothness of null infinity (Q1424235)

Expansions of the gravitational field arising from the development of asymptotically Euclidian, time symmetric, conformally flat initial data are calculated in a neighbourhood of spatial and null infinities up to order 6. To this end a certain representation of spatial infinity as a cylinder is used. This setup is based on the properties of conformal geodesics. It is found that these expansions suggest that null infinity has to be non-smooth unless the Newman-Penrose constants of the spacetime, and some higher order quantities of the spacetime vanish. As a consequence of these results it is conjectured that similar conditions occur if one were to take the expansions to even higher orders. Furthermore, the smoothness conditions obtained suggest that if time symmetric initial data which are conformally flat in a neighbourhood of spatial infinity yield a smooth null infinity, then the initial data must in fact be Schwarzschildean around spatial infinity. The results presented in the main theorem of this article together with the considerations leading to the conjecture put forward in Section 4 seem to suggest that no gravitational radiation should be present around spatial infinity if one is to have a smooth null infinity. In other words, the notion of smooth null infinity seems to be incompatible with the presence of radiation around \(i^0\). Whether this behaviour of spacetime in the neighbourhood of spatial infinity has some implications on either the demeanour of the sources of the gravitational field in the infinite past or on the nature of incoming radiation traveling from past null infinity is a natural -- but hard to answer -- question.