  Numerical relativity has seen incredible progress in the last years, and is
being applied with success to a variety of physical phenomena, from
gravitational-wave research and relativistic astrophysics to cosmology and
high-energy physics. Here we probe the limits of current numerical setups, by
studying collisions of unequal mass, non-rotating black holes of mass-ratios up
to 1:100 and making contact with a classical calculation in General Relativity:
the infall of a point-like particle into a massive black hole.
  Our results agree well with the predictions coming from linearized
calculations of the infall of point-like particles into non-rotating black
holes. In particular, in the limit that one hole is much smaller than the
other, and the infall starts from an infinite initial separation, we recover
the point-particle limit. Thus, numerical relativity is able to bridge the gap
between fully non-linear dynamics and linearized approximations, which may have
important applications. Finally, we also comment on the "spurious" radiation
content in the initial data and the linearized predictions.
