Black hole
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 an artificial singularity, 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."
23rd century Federation science preferred not to use the term "black hole", and used "black star" and/or other terms instead. (TOS: "Tomorrow is Yesterday"; Star Trek: The Motion Picture) By the 24th century the term black hole was again in scientific use. (TNG: "Deja Q", "The Loss") 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")
Black holes can also act similar to wormholes, providing 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)
[edit] Background
Some maintain that the event horizon in "Parallax" should not have acted on Voyager in the manner it did, seeing as Voyager is a faster-than-light starship. However, given the space-time irregularities that are believed to occur within a black hole, one could speculate that a dekyon beam was necessary even for a faster-than-light ship to escape.
The term black hole was not used officially until 1967 (when stated in a lecture by Dr. John Wheeler). Prior to that time several different terms were used officially for these objects, among them "frozen star" and "black star". The term black star is used in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Tomorrow is Yesterday".
Although 21st century science would say that all black holes have singularities in them, it would also say that not all singularities are black holes. Differences in usage in Star Trek supports this understanding.
