Wednesday, 5 August 2015

ftl drive - In Star Trek (2009), how did the warp-capable Enterprise get trapped by the gravity of a black hole?

I'm not a physics geek, but based on Wikipedia's description of an ergosphere, it doesn't really sound like a place where you want to be (whipping around the blackhole at superluminal speeds). And just because it's possible to escape doesn't mean it's easy.



First of all, the greater the mass of an object, the greater the effect it will feel from gravity (i.e. F=m*a).* So it just doesn't make sense to say "where even light can easily escape". Light travels at lightspeed normally (without needing to generate a warp field that distorts spacetime) and is technically massless (sorta), so a photon can escape a gravity well much easier than a huge hulking starship.



Secondly, the easiest way to escape the gravity well of a black hole isn't to fight the gravity head-on; it's to orbit the black hole until you reach escape velocity. IIRC, Enterprise wasn't orbiting the black hole. And as they were already extremely close to the black hole, which was rapidly growing, they probably didn't have time to re-orient themselves to break free by orbiting it. Hence why they needed to resort to extreme measures.

As for why they didn't just jump to warp, it's very possible that the extreme distortion of spacetime around the black hole made this impossible. The black hole could have affected subspace, which would render their warp drive unusable (just as the omega particle's destruction of subspace does the same), or there could have been some other interaction.



But the point is, they did escape. They weren't permanently trapped. If they had been inside the event horizon, then it wouldn't have just been really, really, really difficult to escape. It would have been impossible to escape. So the fact that the incident happened outside of the event horizon makes perfect sense.


Edit:

Upon revisiting the scene, it appears that Enterprise is orthogonal to the rotational plane of the blackhole. This means that it's unlikely to be in the ergosphere since the ergosphere and the event horizon meet at the poles. Though this couldn't have been a rotating (Kerr) black hole in the first place, since the rotation of Kerr black holes is derived from the rotation of the star it formed from. If that's the case, then only the accretion disk is rotating, not the black hole itself.



It also appears that Enterprise did go to warp, but even at maximum warp they remained stationary. So the only way I can think of to explain why they didn't escape is:



  1. In Star Trek, subspace is a part of the spacetime continuum that is distinct from but confluent with normal space. All parts of space naturally has a corresponding area of subspace (unless destroyed), and distorting subspace also distorts normal space, so the reverse is probably equally true.



    As a modification of David Zaslavsky's explaination, they had a warp bubble, but the local spacetime was so distorted by the black hole, the subspace displacement field (which also works by warping space around the vessel) wasn't able to move the Enterprise at all even at maximum warp.


  2. Red matter naturally forms rotating black holes, and Enterprise was inside the ergosphere. And since space itself is rotating at FTL speeds within the ergosphere, even being at warp they could still appear to be stationary.



    However, this explanation has so many flaws that any complete explanation would be incredibly contrived. For instance, the size of the black hole and Enterprise's relative placement and orientation don't add up. Secondly, if this had been the problem, they could have just turned 180° and accelerated in the same direction as the frame drag.


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