How can a supenova threaten...

[M'Sharak]

Yeah, it amazes me that the science in this movie was pretty awfull ,considering they had a NASA science advisor with them.they could have done better. I think a Gama Ray burst would have worked better.

First of all, if you want to be scientific about it, gamma ray bursts are extremely directional--almost beamlike--and can affect only a narrow slice of the galaxy along a line passing through the axis of the star generating said burst. The chances of anything (let alone a well-known TrekVerse world like Romulus) being close enough to that line to be in danger are so low as to make a gamma ray burst a pretty poor candidate for being a major threat to the galaxy. Inventing a SuperDuperFTLNova is a better dramatic choice, even if no one can really explain how one works (or needs to.)

Second, Carolyn Porco was consulted mainly concerning the Titan scene (the original idea had been to do it quite differently, and the change to having the Enterprise warp into Titan's atmosphere was done at her suggestion, iirc.) The filmmakers still decided to do certain things for dramatic or visual effect (the position of Saturn's rings in the background as Enterprise rises out of the mist is one example, even though they should have been nearly edge-on when viewed from Titan.) Porco acknowledged on her Cassini website that sometimes artistic choice trumps scientific accuracy in the interest of telling a story. That's showbiz, as they say.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

About Saturn's rings, it is suggested in the commentary track the real reason, perhaps, we do not see the rings head on. Instead, in the negative space of the rings and the ship, we can see the Starfleet Delta.

 

[the Dagman]

The way I interpreted it is that since the Vulcans only outfitted Spock Prime's ship with the red matter device once the supernova had occurred, yet he still thought he'd have the time to save Romulus is that there was a star within a cluster of stars that went supernova. And that as the blast expanded, it hit the nearby stars, which react by going supernova themselves. Building energy and speed, expanding outward, and so on until it hits Romulus' star, giving us the scene we saw in the mind meld.

And the combination of creating a black hole within such a powerful supernova is what opened the time rift, as it needed the energy of both reactions. Thus why there was no blast of supernova energy coming through the rift to destroy the Kelvin.

Scientific? I doubt it. But it connected the dots enough for me for the sequence not to take me out of the movie and enjoy it as a good space yarn the likes of which we haven't seen for quite some time.

 

[Voyagerian]

I do like 6079Smith's comment re the potential quadrantswide politi-strategic fallout from the loss of Romulus...fodder for 24th-century trekfic! ....and shown well at STOnline...

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

Damaging radiation from a supernova can spread several hundred light years.
Then again, from what it seemed Spock was saying, this was no ordinary supernova. It caught everyone by surprise, and it kind of makes me wonder if there's more to it that we'll see in the next movie.

J.

The one way to think about it is that the supernova is more like the fuse to the "warhead" rather than the warhead itself. Consider it more like destabilizing a major fault line, if such a thing were possible. It is possible that as the deeper workings of space-time have become known, that the risk presented by the Hobus star (or more accurately, the location of the star) was something that simply wasn't understood until the science of the 2380s clarified it.

The idea of a spatiotemporal rift also very neatly explains why Spock and Nero were able to travel through it--this was not an ordinary black hole as we understand it (perhaps the term, by the late 24th century is a catch-all for a number of phenomena, some of which might bear only surface similarities).

As for red matter, I have wondered if perhaps it's somebody's quirky name for something that operates on an extradimensional basis. (As for really weird names getting adopted in real life for sophisticated phenomena, just look at the names of the various types of quarks!) This is the only way to explain how it could be expected to contain an explosion whose effects were already propagating into neighboring star systems--it operated along the same lines as whatever phenomenon the supernova triggered. (Perhaps the explosion represents the "positive" polarity of whatever phenomenon this is, whereas the red matter triggers it in "negative" polarity.)

But then I'm just making stuff up and believing it.

 

[Harv]

I wonder why they didn't have it where it was Romulas's son that went supernova. Wouldn't that have been easier?

This would have hurt Nero's motive though. Nero thought Spock waited to use the red matter so Romulus would be destroyed and he could still save every other planet in the galaxy that was threatened by the Supernova. Sort of a kill two birds with one stone instance.

If the Supernova was only going to destroy Romulus, Spock would have no reason to stop it if he really wanted Romulus to be destroyed. The only purpose his waiting would have served would be to point and laugh at all of surviving Romulans. "Haha, just fucking with ya! Not saving your planet after all!" And that wouldn't be very Spock-like of him. I agree that the idea of a supernova destroying the entire Galaxy is fairly silly, but it being an 'average' Supernova doesn't do much for the story either.