posted
Aside from being an opportunity for some different special effects, just what was the Void in Voyager's fifth season premiere ("Night") supposed to be?
Looking at the relatively well-known maps of the Milky Way, it's easy to assume that Voyager was simply passing between two spiral arms of the galaxy, or something like that. That may be what the writers intended.
But I've been taking an astronomy class this semester, and I've been learning something interesting -- the major features of astronomy that we can see are the BRIGHT ones... but there are other things present that don't normally show up on visible light images. In other words, even the "empty" regions between the spiral arms of the galaxy are almost as full of stars as the other regions -- they're just dimmer stars compared to the younger, bright ones in the arms themselves.
Furthermore, light travels for billions of light-years. We can see clear to Andromeda Galaxy and beyond, just with visible light. There's no way to reasonably explain a complete absence of background stars, as I understand it. There should still be plenty of distant light leaving pinpricks on the sky.
I vaguely recall some mention of bullshit "theta radiation" that the crew blamed for absorbing the light -- but that makes absolutely no sense at all.
It's easy to write this concept off as one more example of the frequent bad science in Voyager, but I thought I'd ask around and see if anyone had some ideas.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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posted
Yes... I've always wondered about this too. You should be able to see even very, very distant stars even if there are no local ones. And then to emerge from this area and suddenly find yourself in a part of space swarming with nebula and star systems... yah... that didn't really seem right.
I believe the explanation was that the radiation was ecluding optical scanners, and presumably blocking or absorbing the visible spectrum. They even asked, "Why can't we see any stars beyond that?", I think. So it was explained... just not very well.
posted
I've taken a couple of Astrononmy classes in my day and I think I can come up with a plausible explanation for Voyager's Void.
If I remember correctly from class, it's Olber's Paradox that purports that if you look in absolutely any direction at all and were to see far enough, you'd eventually run ino a star. If there's that many stars in all lines of sight, why isn't the sky uniformly bright, rather than mostly dark that we see? There's the paradox. Well, visible light is the only portion we see so that hinders what actually reaches our eyes after great distances, and other light photons are absorbed by interstellar or intergalactic matter so it is either absorbed completely or loses enough energy to be shifted to infrared or radio EM, which we can't see.
With Voyager's Void, it could've been a region packed with enough particulate matter (around the void's periphery?) that light and other radiation was readily absorbed at the edge of the void and, once inside, you and your scanners have no readings on light or energy beyond. We know from the show that stars didn't begin to appear (and the sensors only began beeping) when Voyager was at the edge of the void upon its exit.
posted
And where abnormal things tend to happen quite a lot. For example, a species that from the absence of light has evolved into caucasians with black skin.
Yeah, they've got logic comin' out the wazoo. Where's my bourbon?
-------------------- "I'm nigh-invulnerable when I'm blasting!" Mel Gibson, X-Men
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posted
The other thing I'm curious about is this: Exactly how does a spacefaring species evolve in a region with no star systems or planets? I guess they could've evolved somewhere else and moved into the Void region a long, long time ago. But they gave the distinct impression that the species was supposed to be native to that area.
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quote:Originally posted by SoundEffect: With Voyager's Void, it could've been a region packed with enough particulate matter (around the void's periphery?) that light and other radiation was readily absorbed at the edge of the void and, once inside, you and your scanners have no readings on light or energy beyond. We know from the show that stars didn't begin to appear (and the sensors only began beeping) when Voyager was at the edge of the void upon its exit.
I thought of that myself. The problem with your explanation is that any particulate matter with the effect you describe would be dense enough to qualify as a nebula. And furthermore, the outside energy striking the "border" matter would still generate photons like any other -- meaning light. So one could probably see the "wall" if that were the case.
However, the presence of "radiation" in this region only nullifies the argument -- because radiation is light or energy. I see no credible way for different wavelengths of light to "block" each other.
I decided to go dig up Jim Wright's review of "Night" from the Wayback Machine and see what I could find... it's really inconsistent, unsurprisingly.
quote:(Seven:) "I've completed an astrometric scan of the entire region. There are no star systems within 2,500 light-years."
Chakotay's shocked. "Nothing?" Nothing, she confirms. He asks why they can't see any stars beyond that. "There are heavy concentrations of theta-radiation. It is occluding our sensors," she tells him.
Okay, so the theta-radiation byproduct of the waste that we know the Malon were dumping in the area are interfering with sensors. That's reasonable, at least as far as Treknobabble is concerned. But what the hell about looking out the damn window? Theta radiation blocking optical radiation (aka "light") makes as much sense as jumping to Warp 10 and turning into a lizard. Less, actually.
Granted, this argument depends on just what "theta radiation" is -- it being Treknobabble after all, we can't rule out the possibility of something like this. But at the same time, I wouldn't expect something called "radiation" to have drastically different properties from currently known types of radiation. As for Olber's Paradox, that's easy -- the interstellar medium gradually absorbs some of the energy (or something to that effect) making distant stars difficult to see with the naked eye. We know that Hubble can view really, REALLY far out, but we still have trouble detecting some stars and brown dwarfs in our own neighborhood.
Certainly, something SIMILAR to the Void is possible -- and most realistically, starships really shouldn't be lit up at all in interstellar space -- but the way it was shown in the show makes practically no sense at all.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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quote:Originally posted by David Templar: Dark matter. Lots of it.
More like "Dork Matter" ...and Voyager's journey home was full of it.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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Nagilum's void could have been part of a pocket or adjacent dimension. Nagilum seemed pretty damn tough, so who knows? We'll never see him again so why stress it?
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
The VOY Void could indeed have been a "non-natural" phenomenon much like Nagilum's. Or Trelane's. Some sort of a conversion effect could have taken place at the edge, too - absorption of visible light followed by emission of something else besides the usual infrared that would make the edge glow thermally and thus ultimately visually.
If we aim for less-sciFI, more-SCIfi explanations, we could say that whatever stars there were farther out than 2500 ly just plain couldn't be seen due to the glare of the ship's own lighting sources. For experimentation, hang a brightly lit Voyager model in front of a starry sky and wave your night vision goodbye.
This of course fails to explain how we can see stars beyond the windows in ANY Trek situation. Surely they would be invisible from Picard's Observation Lounge in reality, too. And surely the effect on crew psyche would be well known and ever-present.
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