The future asymptotics of Bianchi VIII vacuum solutions (Q2768089)

The cosmological solutions of the Einstein gravitational field equations are discussed for the Bianchi type VIII class of metrics. The main result of the present paper can be described as follows: For every solution, one can find a time direction, such that into that direction, the resulting spacetime is causally geodesically complete. The deduction of the result uses methods which had been applied earlier to the Bianchi type IX case. Further results of the paper are: Properties of the cosmological singularity, comparison with other Bianchi types, and asymptotic behaviour of the cosmic scale factor.