At 4:27a.m. EST, scientists at Geneva's European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) activated the Large Hadron Collider. Touted as the most powerful microscope in the world, physicists believe the particle-smashing device will help us better understand the origins and evolution of the universe.

There are those, however, that think a black hole could emerge from the proton collisions. Those folks pleasantly refer to the microscope as the doomsday machine. And though CERN physicists say a variety of studies and reports make that fear unfounded, we couldn't help but feature a computer-generated idea of what it would look like if Earth was sucked into a black hole.



Check out a less apocalyptic vision of the Large Hadron Collider after the jump.