Ever wondered what would happen if a black hole consumed the Earth?
A black hole calculator allows you to do just that - learn what would happen if the planet was sucked into its mass, destroying the world and snuffing out billions of people.
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The online collision calculator was built by University of Warsaw physics student Álvaro Diez.
"The physics underneath are not extremely complicated (surprisingly enough, you can use Newtonian mechanics to describe general features of black holes with high precision), but are definitely weird," Diez told Space.com via email.
"[I] decided to be part of this 'Year of the Black Hole' of sorts by creating a calculator that would help people understand better these mysterious objects."
Most black holes are created when stars at least three times bigger than our sun die - if there's enough mass left over after it's exploded, the sheer strength of the gravity pulls everything back together into a singularity.
They are the densest things in the universe - objects with gravity so strong not even light can escape.
A black hole's event horizon is the point of no return beyond which anything - stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation - get swallowed into oblivion.
According to the calculator, if a black hole with the mass of the sun consumed the Earth the event horizon would grow 0.00029124 percent. The energy released would be a staggering 0.0008946 Bethe - a unit of energy used to express the large amount released by a supernova.
Earlier this year, researchers discovered two supermassive black holes - each with a mass of more than 800 million times that of our sun - on a collision course described as a "death spiral".
When galaxies merge, their respective black holes begin orbiting each other and drawing closer and closer, stealing each other's energy. What happens then remains to be explained.
"It's a major embarrassment for astronomy that we don't know if supermassive black holes merge," says Princeton University scientist Jenny Greene.
One theory is that when they get to 3.2 light-years apart, they stop moving towards each other, with the slowdown lasting indefinitely - known as the "final parsec problem". In this scenario, only groups of three or more black holes merge.
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