BadAstronomy tackles nuTrek (spoilers)

[Simon_Jester]

Why would Nero's ship travel through the black hole, as well as Spock's, but none of the material it was actually deployed to 'suck in'- shouldn't all the star mass is was supposedly vacumning up have been ejected into the past like Nero and co were? (In the context of the movie treating the black hole as this type of device, that is)

WARNING: Pure, largely unsupported speculation follows:

If Star Trek FTL drives operate by manipulating spacetime, perhaps this lets them survive traversing a wormhole that would not allow ordinary matter to pass?

Or perhaps the supernova matter was ejected into the past, but in the distant past (since it had already fallen in before Nero did). So it wound up being scattered over thousands of years in space and who knows how many light-years of spacetime, making it an interesting astrophysical phenomenon rather than a horrible menace.

[Junghalli]

Could the Mutara Nebula maybe have been an accreation disk around a black hole or neutron star (probably the last remains of an ancient supernova remnant), which the Regula planetoid and the Genesis planet also orbited, and which was in a close orbit of another, still luminous star?

One problem I can think of is that for the Genesis planet to have Earthlike levels of sunlight it would have to be quite close to the luminous star. Could the star have survived the companion swelling into a supergiant and then exploding?

Maybe the two stars have highly elleptical orbits bring them alternately within a few AU of each other and hundreds of AU apart? Of course, this would mean the Genesis planet would have been uninhabitable within a few years tops even if Genesis had worked perfectly.

Maybe the luminous star was a supergiant like Betelguese, with tens to hundreds of thousands of times the luminousity of our sun. Then the habitable zone might be quite far out, far enough that maybe it could have survived the supergiant stage and supernova of the companion?

Alternately, maybe the Genesis planet's sun was the black hole, via a mechanism similar to the one described here?