Nova bomb (Andromeda)

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Nova Bombs are fictional weapons of mass destruction in the Andromeda series. They function by briefly weakening, nullifying or inverting gravity in a large area, with the intended purpose of artificially inducing a supernova.

The destructive power of the nova bomb is not clearly defined, but there is an established upper limit - in the second episode, the Andromeda Ascendant's entire compliment of 40 nova bombs were not powerful enough to destroy a relatively small black hole, although they did temporarily neutralize enough of its gravitational field to briefly turn the black hole into a white hole. However, since a main-sequence star consists of a large body of extremely energetic superheated gas, held under pressure by the gravitational field generated by its own mass, it is actually highly unstable – it would only be necessary to temporarily neutralize a relatively small proportion of a star’s gravitational field to drive it to go supernova. Consequently, while a nova bomb can easily destroy a star, its effect on planets or ships is less certain.

Notably, when used against the Magog world-ship, which is a superstructure made up of an artificial sun surrounded by several hollowed out planets, a nova bomb succeeded in driving the star to go supernova (although, virtually all of the energy released was absorbed by the Spirit of the Abyss), but apparently had no effect on the world-ship’s superstructure.