A tear in the fabric of spacetime, a temporal rift is a highly dangerous temporal anomaly in the Star Trek universe. There have been numerous encounters with such rifts, in many cases, the vessel making the encounter has been transported through space and time. The USS Bozeman entered a temporal disturbance in the Typhon Expanse in 2278, and traveled to the year 2368, where it collided with the USS Enterprise-D and started a temporal causality loop. (TNG: "Cause and Effect")

The Enterprise-D encountered a temporal rift-like phenomenon in the region of Archer IV in 2366. The rift was identified as a Kerr loop formed from superstring material. The rift had, in fact, transported the USS Enterprise-C and its crew from 2344 and the Narendra system. The disappearance of the vessel from its proper place in time caused the formation of an alternate timeline, which was resolved by taking the Enterprise-C back through the rift, leaving no direct evidence of the temporal upheaval. (TNG: "Yesterday's Enterprise")

The creation of artificial temporal rifts allowed certain 29th century Starfleet vessels to travel through time. The Aeon used a temporal rift to travel back to 2373 in order to destroy USS Voyager. When the rift destabilized, both Voyager and Aeon were pulled in by the gravimetric forces, ending up in the 20th century. (VOY: "Future's End", "Future's End, Part II"). In 2404 of an alternate timeline, Admiral Kathryn Janeway opened and traveled through a temporal rift to help Voyager return home 16 years earlier than it did. Her plan worked, allowing Voyager to return from the Delta Quadrant in 2378 rather than 2394. (VOY: "Endgame").

It is not known what the Kerr loops mentioned above are, but real physics does feature the Kerr wormhole and the Kerr vacuum.

There are four known, exact, black hole solutions to Einstein's equations describing gravity in General Relativity. Two of these (Kerr black hole or Kerr-Newman black hole) are rotating.

In general relativity, the Kerr vacuum (more commonly referred to as the Kerr metric) describes the geometry of spacetime around a rotating massive body. According to this metric, such rotating bodies should exhibit frame dragging (rotating bodies dragging spacetime around themselves). Roughly speaking, this effect predicts that objects coming close to a rotating mass will be entrained to participate in its rotation, not because of any applied force or torque that can be felt, but rather because the curvature of spacetime associated with rotating bodies. At close enough distances, all objects — even light itself — must rotate with the body; the region where this holds is called the ergosphere.

The Kerr metric is often used to describe rotating black holes, which exhibit even more exotic phenomena. Such black holes have two surfaces where the metric appears to have a singularity; the size and shape of these surfaces depends on the black hole's mass and angular momentum.

The superstring material mentioned above may allued to materials in superstring theory. In real physics, superstring theory is an attempt to explain all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in one theory by modelling them as vibrations of tiny supersymmetric strings. It is considered one of the most promising candidate theories of quantum gravity. Superstring theory is a shorthand for supersymmetric string theory because unlike bosonic string theory, it is the version of string theory that incorporates fermions and supersymmetry.