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In ST XI and the prequel comic Countdown, why could they only use Red Matter to stop the Hobus supernova? We know from other sources that the Romulans are quite capable of creating their own artificial singularities (They use them to power their ships, as stated in TNG "Timescape"), and there were other means too, such as the trilithium weapon from Generations. Seriously, why was Red Matter their only hope of survival? It doesn't make sense. 194.168.208.42 11:20, May 30, 2012 (UTC)

An artificial quantum singularity would be a very small, microscopic singularity, like a microscopic black hole. It may be relatively easy for the Romulans to squash a smidgeon of matter down to that size. But a star like Hobus, which I guess is a massive, exotic supergiant star anyway, is vastly bigger and much more complicated, and much faster moving. Squashing that would be way beyond anyone but Q, maybe. -- BadCatMan 11:43, May 30, 2012 (UTC)

I would have thought it wouldn't really matter how big the singularity was. In real life, tiny black holes are capable of sucking in gigantic amounts of matter, or so I've always believed. 82.2.136.93 16:28, May 30, 2012 (UTC)

Conservation of mass and energy. The black hole formed from a collapsed star has the same mass (less actually) as the star it is formed from. That mass is just contained in a much more compact area. If you replaced the Earths sun with a black hole of equal mass (hypothetically assuming our sun was massive enough to collapse, which it isnt, and also assuming there was no supernova explosion), the planets would remain exactly where they are now, in their same orbits. Of course wed all be dead, but the planets would not be "sucked in" to the black hole. Black holes are not the infinite vacuum cleaners they are portrayed as on tv. They only gain mass (and thus gravitational power) by sucking more mass in, when they start out they are no more gravitationally powerful than the star they were originally formed from 75.64.216.248 21:05, January 13, 2013 (UTC)

The implication was that Hobus's exotic qualities included warping of subspace as well, meaning that the shock wave/expansion traveled at warp speeds (explaining how one star explosion could reach each other within a humanoid lifetime) through a subspace phenomenon not predictable with modern singularities. possibly the mass was a factor, but the presence of decalithium in Hobus's planetary surrounding (implied to be a complex variant of dilithium and trilithium) seems to be a contributing exotic factor. in fact, Nero gave some Hobus decalithium to Spock to make the red matter.

so definitely not a standard singularity you could apply the above logic to. -- Captain MKB 17:48, May 30, 2012 (UTC)