Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Romulans

There are a few differences between the supernovae that destroyed Romulus as depicted in Star Trek (2009) and in Star Trek: Picard. For one thing, Nero's comment to Pike that "Your Federation did nothing and allowed my people to burn" now seems mighty rich. More to the point, the location of the exploding star was never specified in the J.J. Abrams outing, although the original script did place it in the Beta Quadrant. In defiance of a good deal of logic and physics, Spock Prime clearly stated in the movie that the star threatened to destroy not just Romulus but "the galaxy".

Before Picard, various beta canon works attempted to explain this impossible oddity as best they could. The Star Trek: Countdown comics, which served as a prequel to Star Trek (2009), had already attributed the supernova's power to the interaction with a rare mineral called 'decalithium'. They also gave the location of the star as the 'Hobus system,' nearby Romulus.

In Star Trek: Online, it is also the 'Hobus' supernova that destroyed Romulus (and Remus), the game adding that the energy from the blast then travelled through subspace faster than the speed of light. STO then had its own scheming Romulan — Hakeev — who, in this case, directly caused the supernova through the use of decalithium and protomatter in an attempt to contact the Iconians. Thankfully, one might be tempted to say, Picard's first season put paid to all that by firmly giving the Romulan sun as the star that went boom. And if Nero wasn't happy with the evacuation efforts, he should have taken it up with a certain 'Commodore' Oh and co.!