An expert on physics and black holes attempted to explain the amount of energy that would be released if Earth, or a different planet as massive as Earth, collided with a black hole. His explanation is based on the data provided by an online calculator that computes the energy produced by black hole collisions.
Alvaro Diez, a particle physics student at the University of Warsaw in Poland, recently launched an online tool known as the Black Hole Collision Calculator. As its name suggests, this tool computes the amount of energy that would be released by an object if it gets sucked into a black hole.
The Black Hole Collision Calculator
According to the calculator, if Earth or another planet with the same size falls into a black hole that's five times more massive than the Sun, the energy that would be released by the collision between these massive cosmic objects would be 32,204,195,564,497,649,676,480,000,000,000,000 megajoules (MJ).
As noted by Diez, this number is simply too large for humans to understand. In other words, the amount of energy that would be released by the collision between Earth and a black hole is far greater than anything on the planet. "The short answer is that there is no way to communicate, visualize or understand such an amount of energy," he told Express.
Understanding The Collision between Earth and Black Hole
Despite the unimaginable nature of the energy from the collision, Diez tried to explain it by comparing it to other cosmic objects. According to the physics expert, if each of the stars in the universe was orbited by an Earth-like planet, then the energy consumed by these systems within a couple of decades would be slightly equivalent to the energy produced by a black hole collision.
"If every star in the known universe had one Earth orbiting around it just like ours, the energy consumed by all of them during 50 years would be slightly less than the energy released in the collision between Earth and a 5solar masses black hole," Diez stated.
