The Bassen Rift is an area of space between Romulus and the Romulan Neutral Zone. A dense nebula field with many greenish-hued cloud formations, passage through the Rift disrupts subspace communications. In 2379, the Bassen Rift was the location of a major conflict between the USS Enterprise-E, assisted by forces of the Romulan Star Empire, against the Reman warbird Scimitar, which was commanded by Shinzon. (Star Trek Nemesis)

There is no Bassen rift in real astronomy - this area of space was named by Nemesis screenwriter John Logan for his pet basset hound. However, the Great Rift is a series of dark, obscuring dust clouds in our Milky Way. These clouds stretch from the constellation Sagittarius to the constellation Cygnus. It is an apparent break in the Milky Way between Cygnus and Sagittarius caused by a series of large, dark overlapping clouds about 100 parsecs (2×1015 miles or 3×1015 kilometers) distant in the equatorial plane of the Galaxy.

The term 'rift' in fact a geological term referring to a place where the Earth's crust and lithosphere are being pulled apart, such as the East African Rift, the Red Sea Rift, the Rio Grande Rift and the Baikal Rift Zone (the bottom of Lake Baikal in Russia is the deepest continental rift on the earth). A rift valley would be an elongated valley formed by the depression of a block of a planet's crust between two faults or groups of faults of approximately parallel strike.