How does red matter stop a supernova?

[David cgc]

It's referred to as a planetoid, and there's that shot where we see the Enterprise, and then track up to the other side to see the Reliant. Now, Trek has been deceptive and exaggerated with scale and distance in effects, too, but that'd be really blatant. They never would've done that shot with the Earth, say. The implication is Regula is only a few dozen miles across.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Actually, I'm pretty sure the explosion of Reliant was pretty much just a matter of the Genesis Device tearing it apart at the moment of activation. Doesn't take an explosive to do that; a turbine with a couple of missing fanblades will do the same thing to your average submarine.

Yeah, but submarines aren't carrying something as volatile as antimatter.

Antimatter isn't volatile, and doesn't explode on contact with matter. It ANNIHILATES on contact with matter, but if there isn't alot of stuff around the antimatter to soak up all the energy released from the reaction, all you've got is a very bright flash of gamma rays.

Genesis pretty much HAS to be a self-replicating swarm device in order to keep working under those conditions, though. The effect would have been localized to reliant and a small portion of the nebula to create a miniature genesis cave. But a swarm of devices acting on some kind of final configuration program would find the pulverized material from Reliant lacking and would set about tearing down the nebula to satisfy the rest of their mass/energy quota.

Are we assuming it was Mutara and not Regula? I always figured Mutara as a young planetary nebula (it's gotta be, to be so dense), with Regula a planet maybe Mars or asteroid belt-distant from the resulting white dwarf star. The nebula was cleared locally by the Genesis effect (and the Reliant explosion) and most of it wound up being pushed away.

In the script and in some of the FX shots we do see the nebula being dragged back into the epicenter of the explosion by what is implied to be a large-scale genesis effect. There's alot of mass in a nebula, but it's usually pretty widely distributed.

At any rate, I'm fine with Genesis as swarming microscopic replicator devices.

But once again, nobody said anything about them being microscopic. A single Genesis device is nearly two meters tall; replicating another one next to it would produce a second two-meter tall replicator, like Rom's self-replicating mines.

Back to red matter, maybe it has something to do with chromodynamics, given the name. It's probably just as stupid, in the final analysis, but a material that does something to increase the range of the strong force to work between adjacent nuclei, and not just within nuclei (and in a really permanent fashion only within protons), would, I suppose, make extremely dense region of matter.

I'm pretty sure red matter is just a graviton catalyst (hence the need to drop it into the MIDDLE of Vulcan to work). Matter falls into the singularity and is broken down and converted to gravitational energy, which in turn pulls more matter into the singularity. Eventually the black hole consumes all matter within the immediate range of its gravitational pull, runs out of energy and dies.

If you consider that a supernova explodes only because it its producing far more kinetic energy than gravity can counteract, inserting red matter into the center of it would be a cheap way of restoring equilibrium and arresting that expansion.

 

[Vance]

The gravity certainly seemed to be within Earth standard.

Starfleet Corp of Engineers probably just threw down some gravity plating for the Genesis tunnels. That doesn't quite explain the 'cave', unless it too was lined with them.

 

[Ronald Held]

After the Genesis wave altered the interior, that could have been part of the programming. The outer area could have used gravity plates.