Final Black Hole Note: This Is Absurd

A couple of black hole notes ago, I was able to roughly deduce the size of the Vulcan black hole in Star Trek (2009) and take a stab at its mass. I'm decently confident in my conclusions to date, but it occurs to me that there must be some other mechanism at work when there's a great deal of red matter involved. I think the massive amounts of red matter used in the creation of the Final Black Hole somehow gave it more gravitational attraction, and perhaps more mass than it should reasonably have.

I conclude this because, as I noted last time, the Enterprise can travel faster than light, and should therefore have been able to pull away from the black hole without any trouble. In the quest to try and fit all of J.J. Abrams' nonsense into an astronomically coherent system, I'm going to see what it would take for the FBH to have the kind of gravitational attraction that it did.

At the end of the movie, before they blow up the black hole with antimatter, the Enterprise goes to full warp in order to escape from the FBH. I couldn't find an exact value in the Star Trek Wiki for how fast "maximum warp" is, in terms of kilometers per hour; it did say that Warp 1 equals light speed and that Starfleet ships could manage Warp 9 at best during this time period, but I don't know what scale they're using. Warp 9 could be 9x light speed, or it could be nine levels up on an exponential, logarathmic or just arbitrary scale. I don't know. Thus, I'm forced to try Plan B.

In the movie, the Enterprise travels from Earth to the Vulcan home world. Now, according to a canon reference in a Star Trek novelization book I happen to own, the Vulcan home planet orbits 40 Eridani A. This is a real star, located 16.45 light years from Earth. Now, here's where it gets slightly stupid: we see the Enterprise both entering and exiting warp in the movie. If we assume that the movie is taking place in real time (and there's compelling evidence to do so; Kirk's in a tearing hurry the whole time), we can know the time it takes for the Enterprise to travel that distance. In the film, that's five minutes and 17 seconds. Meanwhile, Wikipedia gives one light year as 9,460,730,472,580.8 km. That times 16.45 is 155629016273954.16 km. That divided by 317 seconds is 490,943,269,003.01 kilometers per second. Light travels at a geriatric 300,000 kilometers per second, so when the Enterprise is at warp, it is traveling at 1,636,477 times the speed of light. Which means that the gravitational pull of the black hole is 1,636,477 times the speed of light, plus more, since the Enterprise was slowly pulled in by the black hole. WHICH MEANS that as soon as the black hole was created, Kirk and Spock and everyone aboard both the Romulan ship and the Enterprise should've been pulled inside immediately (when they weren't at warp) and DIED.


In conclusion, J.J. Abrams has literally violated every single rule* of what we know about black holes. Fuck that noise.

*Multiplication of mass, abuse of the Schwartzchild radius, we can see the unseeable black hole on the screen, no red-shift in the communications from Nero's ship, evidence of an accretion disk where no matter exists to make one, more abuse of the Schwartzchild radius AND SO ON.