You'll have to pardon me as I've only a crude and basic understand of physics based off stuff I learned in high-school over 10 years ago and limited self-study.
I understand what you are saying and it "make sense" but at the same time I don't much understand how trillions of tiny particles each with miniscule gravitational pull spread out across over hundreds of thousand if not millions of miles is going to have the same gravitational effect as all of those particles in one, single, huge mass.
All the particles in that clump of mass are pulling on you in different directions, but the pulls in opposite directions cancel out, or average out, so that it all seems to be coming from a single point at the center of mass. Every agglomeration of mass, whether solid, liquid, or gas, behaves as if all its mass is concentrated in the center of its volume. That's why a person can balance on a tightrope -- as long as your center of mass is above the tightrope, it doesn't matter how much mass is out to the sides, because the CoM is where all the action is.
Besides -- we're talking about the supernova's effect on objects light-years away. At that distance, the difference between a sun's mass concentrated in a ball a million kilometers across and the same mass spread out in a cloud a billion kilometers across would be trivial. From that distance, they'd both be point sources -- just like all the stars just look like points of light to us, even though they range from smaller than the Sun to hundreds of times bigger.
And, if we're not going to invoke subspace here and just stick with gravity, we could probably surmise that, perhaps, the Trilithium Torpedo's detonation converted some of the star's mass into energy, enough of it apparently to drasticly alter the Nexus' path.
If we're not invoking subspace, it would take years for the effect to reach the Nexus. As stated above, gravity only propagates at the speed of light.
To salvage this we can invoke ``subspace effects'' which are somehow disrupted by the star's explosion and which interact strongly with the Nexus. But the dialogue actually says gravitational effects. Perhaps there's some way the two are related enough that even Data doesn't make the correction...
It's concievable by the 24th century they've discovered that whatever element of the universe "generates" gravity has a subspace component and, yeah, that effected the Nexus which could easily be infered as a disruption of/extension or element of subspace.
Heck, we know that today. Gravitation is described by Einsteinian theory as an alteration of the topology of spacetime under the influence of mass/energy. So
any change in the shape of space -- or subspace -- is a gravitational effect by definition.
Besides -- in mathematics, a subspace is a lower-dimensional subset of an n-dimensional space. String theory proposes seven "curled-up" dimensions whose topology determines the laws of physics in our universe, and altering that topology could alter physical constants. Some have called these extra dimensions a subspace, and that's how I interpret Trek's subspace. And string theory also suggests that gravitons, the exchange particles of gravitation, are not confined to our four dimensions, but propagate out into the extra "subspace" dimensions, which is why gravity manifests as such a weak force (because most of its effect is leaking out into subspace). This would suggest that gravitational effects are much stronger in subspace than in normal space -- and they might propagate faster there too, if the topology is sufficiently different.
This has other consequences. For example, stuff put on the inside of a Dyson sphere, as seen in ``Relics'', would fall off into the sun because the net gravitation from the sphere is zero on its interior.
Unless the Dyson Sphere's shell/"surface" had gravity generators to overcome the star's gravity and I'm guessing even the Sphere's OWN gravity. The otherside of the sphere from where one would be standing (I would assume) would cause an incredible pull on you.
You're missing the point. The net gravitation at
any point inside a uniform spherical shell of mass is zero. The pull of gravity from the far side of the sphere would be cancelled out by the pull from the near side of the sphere. No matter where you are inside the sphere, even if you're right up against its inner surface, the pulls in all directions cancel out exactly. (The closer you get to one side, the more mass there is on the opposite side pulling you away from it, but the pull from the mass on the nearer side is stronger, cancelling it out.)
