Black holeedit
From Memory Alpha, the free Star Trek reference
- You might also be looking for the Ferengi beverage known as the black hole.
A black hole is an incredibly dense remnant of a star that has collapsed under its own gravity after running out of hydrogen fuel. The resulting body is too massive to counteract its own gravitational forces and so collapses into itself. Black holes have extremely strong gravitational fields, similar to cosmic string fragments; even light cannot escape their gravitational fields.
Vulcans had charted over 2,000 of them – presumably in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants – by the 22nd century. (ENT: "Singularity")
Each black hole has an associated event horizon, the boundary of which light can no longer escape. In some ways this can be regarded as the black hole's surface. In 2371 the USS Voyager became trapped by a black hole and experienced unusual temporal and spatial distortions, but escaped by using a dekyon beam to open a hole in the event horizon. (VOY: "Parallax")
Black holes are naturally occurring but similar to artificial singularities, such as those used by 24th century Romulan starships or the Hirogen communications network relay station encountered by Voyager in 2374.
In 2366 the USS Enterprise-D, while attempting to correct a deteriorating orbit of the moon of Bre'el IV, was informed by Q that the cause of the problem was "the result of a large celestial object passing through at near right angles to the plane of the star system... probably a black hole."
The Quantum singularity lifeforms need a gravity well to incubate their young and mistook the artificial engine core of a Romulan warbird for a black hole. (TNG: "Timescape")
20th century Earth science also used the term "black hole" of phenomena with similar properties to a wormhole, that provide a shortcut through space. Captain Kirk speculated that the V'Ger probe traveled through one and emerged on the far side of the galaxy where it fell into a machine planet's gravitational field. (Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
A black hole can be formed by the detonation of a small amount of red matter. Such a phenomenon caught the vessels Narada and Jellyfish following the use of red matter against the supernova of 2387. Both ships were sent back in time to the mid 23rd century, a time differential of twenty-five years being caused by the few seconds difference in their entries. The actions of the Narada created an alternate reality, in which red matter was used to form a singularity in the core of Vulcan which destroyed the planet. The Narada was later caught in another black hole when a large supply of red matter was detonated within the ship following a collision with the Jellyfish. (Star Trek)
