Dynamics of Quiet Universes

We study the stability of a contracting {\it silent universe}, which is a spacetime with irrotational dust and vanishing magnetic part of the Weyl tensor, $H_{ab}=0$. Two general relativistic backgrounds are analyzed; one is an attractor of {\it silent universes}, i.e., a locally Kasner spacetime, and the other is a particular class of inhomogeneous Szekeres solutions. In both cases their stabilities against perturbations with non-zero magnetic part depend on a contraction configuration; a spindle-like collapse is unstable, while a pancake-like collapse is still stable. We also find that a similar instability exists in spindle collapse for a Newtonian case. We conclude that $H_{ab}=0$ is not a generic ansatz even in general relativistic dust collapse.