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Apparently, You Might Be Able Create A Black Hole if You Pump Your Music too Loud

Turn up the volume loud enough and you might create a black hole.

Loud music can cause all kinds of trouble. Turn the volume up too high, and you might piss off your mom, scare your cat, and wake up your brother. Push the limits at a rave, and you could blow the speakers or attract the cops. According to a recent Subreddit discussion, if you gas the levels just a little further, you might rip open the space-time continuum and unleash a black hole larger than the universe

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On Subreddit /r/ELI5, aka Explain Like I'm Five, people write in with complicated questions, and others try to explain them in the simplest possible terms. Three months ago, a user named rsashe1980 chimed in with a head-scratcher about sound volume: "How would a sound of 1100 decibels loud create a black hole larger than the Observable Universe?" The query appears to have stemmed from a 2013 video by the channel Vsauce, which uses math and science to explain video game phenomena.

User hazar815 responded to the question, observing that a sound greater than 1,100 decibels (for reference, a lawn mower heard from 3 feet away produces 100 decibels) would unleash enough energy to act like an equivalent quantity of mass. Through Einstein's laws of relativity, this mass would create enough gravity enough to form a black hole. Shortly thereafter, everything in existence would disappear in a crush of sound and fury and you'd feel like a real tool.

No need to throw your new speakers out the window just yet, though. Hazar815 notes that "a sound of that magnitude would require 1098 watts/meter2," which is "an absolutely insane amount of power, far in excess of what we can produce, and is many of orders of magnitude greater than what a supernova creates. So we don't have to worry about it actually happening."

Furthermore, as user Dark_Ethereal explains, decibels increase "logarithmically," or exponentially—adding one decibel is the same as multiplying by two. So, "20 decibels isn't 2 times more powerful than 10 decibels, it's 10 times more powerful." And by that logic, "1100 is 10109 times more powerful than 10 decibels. That is 1 with 109 zeros after—1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0000 times more powerful."

If this were to actually happen, the resulting black hole would be "larger, in fact, than our observable universe."

So, rest easy—chances are, you won't suck the galaxy into a churning abyss when you crank your favorite trap remix. Better check with your mom, though.

(h/t Youredm.com)