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Abstract

Consider a globally hyperbolic cosmological spacetime. Topologically, the spacetime is then a compact 3-manifold in cartesian product with an interval. Assuming that there is an expanding direction, is there any relation between the topology of the 3-manifold and the asymptotics? In fact, there is a result by Michael Anderson, where he obtains relations between the long-time evolution in General Relativity and the geometrization of 3-manifolds. In order to obtain conclusions however, he makes assumptions concerning the rate of decay of the curvature as proper time tends to infinity. It is thus of interest to find out if such curvature decay conditions are always fulfilled. We consider here the Gowdy spacetimes, for which we prove that the decay condition holds. However, we observe that for general Bianchi VIII spacetimes, the curvature decay condition does not hold, but that some aspects of the expected asymptotic behaviour are still true.