The existence of contact structures on 9-manifolds

We give necessary and sufficient conditions for a closed orientable 9-manifold M to admit an almost contact structure. The conditions are stated in terms of the Stiefel-Whitney classes of M and other more subtle homotopy invariants of M. By a fundamental result of Borman, Eliashberg and Murphy, M admits an almost contact structure if and only if M admits an over-twisted contact structure. Hence we give necessary and sufficient conditions for M to admit an over-twisted contact structure and we prove that if N is another closed 9-manifold which is homotopy equivalent to M, then M admits an over-twisted contact structure if and only if N does. In addition, for W_i(M) the i-th integral Stiefel-Whitney class of M, we prove that if W_3(M) = 0 then W_7(M) = 0.