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Question about black hole in ST

Vagando

Cadet
Newbie
Okay, so a black hole sucks in two ships who come out the other side unscathed but in the future (let's not even go into the bad science on this part)...yet a planet gets destroyed? Doesn't make sense! Shouldn't Vulcan have been sucked in and come out the other side unscathed too? Same for the supernova matter? :confused::confused::confused:
 
No. There is a theoretcial basis for certain types of rotating singularities that objects can pass through without being spaghettified, but that assumes you're coming at it from a certain angle. When it's created in the guts of a planet, that wouldn't be an option.
 
I didn't quite understand that either, black holes don't really do that. Even if somehow it was a time travel gateway then wouldn't it still completely crush the ships.
 
I didn't quite understand that either, black holes don't really do that. Even if somehow it was a time travel gateway then wouldn't it still completely crush the ships.

Nope. For everyday black holes, yeah, but rotating singularities can actually be used as a sort of wormhole.
 
The ships traveled through a black hole which was made up of the Nova's mass. The red matter is only the catalyst, but the planet itself supplied the mass from which the singularity/Black Hole was formed. Likewise in the past of alternate reality/universe: Vulcan wasn't sucked into a black hole, but actually became a black hole.
 
I didn't quite understand that either, black holes don't really do that. Even if somehow it was a time travel gateway then wouldn't it still completely crush the ships.

Nope. For everyday black holes, yeah, but rotating singularities can actually be used as a sort of wormhole.

According to my Astronomy textbook from college, a typical blackhole will stretch and destroy approaching objects as they are pulled in ... but if the schwartzfield radius of the black hole was very large, then it would be possible for something rather small to get sucked in w/o being destroyed, theoretically of course.

So Vulcan was too massive to slip through the schwartzfield radius w/o destruction, while the starships were small enough.
Of course the textbook mentions that the schwartzfield radius would have to be 300km for a person to pass through without being torn apart ... so the radius of the blackhole would have to be absolutely giant to let the Narada through.
 
I didn't quite understand that either, black holes don't really do that. Even if somehow it was a time travel gateway then wouldn't it still completely crush the ships.

Nope. For everyday black holes, yeah, but rotating singularities can actually be used as a sort of wormhole.

According to my Astronomy textbook from college, a typical blackhole will stretch and destroy approaching objects as they are pulled in ... but if the schwartzfield radius of the black hole was very large, then it would be possible for something rather small to get sucked in w/o being destroyed, theoretically of course.

So Vulcan was too massive to slip through the schwartzfield radius w/o destruction, while the starships were small enough.
Of course the textbook mentions that the schwartzfield radius would have to be 300km for a person to pass through without being torn apart ... so the radius of the blackhole would have to be absolutely giant to let the Narada through.

True, but I chalk this up to the SFX tendency to reduce the distances of everything in space so it fits on screen (TNG and DS9 were really bad about this. "the ship is 4000 km away? Then why does the effects shot show it 300 meters off your bow?")
 
Okay, so a black hole sucks in two ships who come out the other side unscathed but in the future (let's not even go into the bad science on this part)...yet a planet gets destroyed? Doesn't make sense! Shouldn't Vulcan have been sucked in and come out the other side unscathed too? Same for the supernova matter? :confused::confused::confused:
Black Hole A: Sent Nero and Spock back in time. It wasn't created inside anything and "sucked" them in.
Black Hole B: Created inside the planet thereby sucking the inside of the planet before the outside, destroying it. Had this black hole been created near Vulcan and not in Vulcan, who knows?
 
Okay, so a black hole sucks in two ships who come out the other side unscathed but in the future (let's not even go into the bad science on this part)...yet a planet gets destroyed? Doesn't make sense! Shouldn't Vulcan have been sucked in and come out the other side unscathed too? Same for the supernova matter? :confused::confused::confused:
Black Hole A: Sent Nero and Spock back in time. It wasn't created inside anything and "sucked" them in.
Black Hole B: Created inside the planet thereby sucking the inside of the planet before the outside, destroying it. Had this black hole been created near Vulcan and not in Vulcan, who knows?

I think the writers also added an explanation that (paraphrasing here) the ships shields, or something like that, kept the black hole from ripping the ships apart when they were sucked into the original black hole in the Prime Universe. But at the end when the Narada went into the black hole it was destroyed because it was already so damaged that there wasn't any shielding to protect it.

If you take this explanation at face value then you can say that since the planet didn't have shields there is no way for it to survive going through the black hole.
 
Okay, so a black hole sucks in two ships who come out the other side unscathed but in the future (let's not even go into the bad science on this part)...yet a planet gets destroyed? Doesn't make sense! Shouldn't Vulcan have been sucked in and come out the other side unscathed too? Same for the supernova matter? :confused::confused::confused:

structurally no. when you create a vacum from the inside out, structural integrity is severely compromised so it will have no choice but to collapse. the future ships on the other hand have shielding and whatnot and the force is coming from the outside pulling them in. think about it this way, which would do a lot of damage, if stick a vacum tube on the outside of your arm or if you cut thriough the skin and actually stick that vacum inside you?
 
For the umpteenth time: Black Holes do NOT suck.

No more than the Earth "sucks" a person who jumps off a cliff to the ground.

Secondly, it's "possible" 24th century ships have strong enough and powerful enough gravity generators and structural-integrity-fields to negate blackholes' gravity forces. Not too much of a stretch for a society that had the technology to give Einstein and Netwon the finger and do things like move faster than the speed of light and convert people's mass into energy, transmit it, and then turn it back into matter again.

So, yeah, they just *might* be able to negate the gravity forces and spaghettification effect on black holes.

Why Vulcan wasn't simply moved to the otherside of the hole? First of all, its mass was being used to create the blackhole. Secondly, the blackhole pulled Vulcan in from the inside out. A very different occurance than stepping through one.

Now on a related topic, depending on how you want to look at warp travel it may not be possible for a starship to escape a black hole.

Black Holes have tremendous gravity. So tremendous not even light itself is fast enough to escape it. So once you're "in" a black hole you cannot get out of its influence.

But, you say, starships can move faster than light so they MUST be able toe scape a black hole.

Well... maybe. There's two ways to look at warp travel. One is a more "Newtonian" way of looking at it. That its powerful enough to push a ship faster than light in the physical universe and somehow the length and time effects suggested by Einstein are negated by other systems. If this is the case then, yes, a starship could escape a black hole.

Then there's the concept that warp travel doesn't take place in the "real" universe but in a "sub space" where more feasable speeds translate to FTL speeds in the "real" universe. That's to say that at even Warp 9 the Enterprise really isn't moving at 100s of times the speed of light it's moving at, say, 1/2 the speed of light. But the area of subspace that it is in makes the distance between "point A" and "point B" shorter so that 1/2c translated to a many multiples of C. (Think of moving from the outside of a circle to an inner arc.) We also have to assume that other systems still somehow negate the effects of time at moving even at a fraction of C.

If *this* is the case. Since then a ship cannot escape a black hole because it cannot move faster than light. Although it may be possible the bending of space to get into "subspace" means being able to escape a black hole's influence.

WarpTheory.JPG
 
Okay, so a black hole sucks in two ships who come out the other side unscathed but in the future (let's not even go into the bad science on this part)...yet a planet gets destroyed? Doesn't make sense! Shouldn't Vulcan have been sucked in and come out the other side unscathed too? Same for the supernova matter? :confused::confused::confused:

Answer is simple: Another plot hole.
 
Okay, so a black hole sucks in two ships who come out the other side unscathed but in the future (let's not even go into the bad science on this part)...yet a planet gets destroyed? Doesn't make sense! Shouldn't Vulcan have been sucked in and come out the other side unscathed too? Same for the supernova matter? :confused::confused::confused:

Answer is simple: Another plot hole.

No. The more accurate, and equally simple answer, is that some people (I'm not naming names) simply aren't smart enough to understand this perfectly valid story point.
 
The ships traveled through a black hole which was made up of the Nova's mass. The red matter is only the catalyst, but the planet itself supplied the mass from which the singularity/Black Hole was formed. Likewise in the past of alternate reality/universe: Vulcan wasn't sucked into a black hole, but actually became a black hole.

So red matter is just a catalyst?
If Vulcan was compressed to a small enough size to become a black hole, it would be smaller than a golf ball, I guess that could explain it 'disappearing' from view.
But the Narada could never create/become a black hole, there just isn't enough mass.
And even if it did somehow, it would not have enough gravitational force to almost trap the Enterprise at the end. The gravitational force of the new black hole would be the same as the original gravitational pull of the Narada.


No, The red matter has to do more, because it doesn't fit the science otherwise.
 
The ships traveled through a black hole which was made up of the Nova's mass. The red matter is only the catalyst, but the planet itself supplied the mass from which the singularity/Black Hole was formed. Likewise in the past of alternate reality/universe: Vulcan wasn't sucked into a black hole, but actually became a black hole.

So red matter is just a catalyst?
If Vulcan was compressed to a small enough size to become a black hole, it would be smaller than a golf ball, I guess that could explain it 'disappearing' from view.
But the Narada could never create/become a black hole, there just isn't enough mass.
And even if it did somehow, it would not have enough gravitational force to almost trap the Enterprise at the end. The gravitational force of the new black hole would be the same as the original gravitational pull of the Narada.


No, The red matter has to do more, because it doesn't fit the science otherwise.

See, now that's a plot hole.
 
Maybe the way red matter acts as a catalyst is that it temporarily creates a huge gravitational attraction when detonated - it doesn't have the actual mass to created a black hole, but it emits gravitons in such quantity that it acts as if it has a huge mass, enough to crush the planet Vulcan, or to tear open space-time to allow the ships through. Once the red matter effect dissipates, all you're left with is a tiny singularity the mass of Vulcan.

This could explain why Spock and Nero arrive 25 years apart - as the red matter effect was degrading, thye gravitational field it emitted was fluctuating, moving the endpoint of the wormhole it was creating. It would alsol explain Scotty's solution of blowing the warp cores at the end - they weren't riding a shockwave (no shockwaves in a vacuum) they were using the detonations to disrupt the red matter field, thus loosening the gavitational grip enough for warp drive to move them away from the effect.
 
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