Im watching the old first Star Trek movie tonight and just watched the wormhole and the little asteroid scene.
So what was the big deal about the wormhole anyway? Kirk and Decker were freaking out about it etc.
I am a big Star trek nerd so I will completly nerd out and try to answer.
(I mostly like the stories and the Kirk/Spock/McCoy banter and not so much the science)
(I think I got this right, but if anybody knows different, please correct)Warp 1 is a little faster than the speed light. If the engines& speed are not correct and you go exactly light speed a wormhole can appear, when it does you have the effect shown on film, which is of course dangerous.
How a asteriod was caught in a wormhole, I do not know.
This is all fictional of course, but an antimatter imbalance in the engines (later corrected by Spock) caused the wormhole to appear and the ship was stuck in it because the temporal distortion overloaded the navigational, power and communications systems, and there was the time distortion also happening. They had to wait for the ship to slow down to sublight speed by itself for the wormhole to stop, and in the meantime had to stop the ship from crashing into that asteroid which they were slowly gaining on.
This was written after studying info from three websites.