The Earth Now Weighs 6 Ronnagrams!
The Earth can now be said to weigh about six ronnagrams, instead of 6000 yottagrams.
Jupiter can be described as having a mass of about 1.9 quettagrams, instead of just 1.9 million yottagrams. And an electron’s weight is one rontogram, or 0.001 yoctograms.
The ability to more succinctly describe the weight of our planet and the particles of our visible world comes after a meeting of scientists and officials in the outskirts of Paris that ended on Friday (Nov 18, 2022).
Participants at the 27th meeting of the General Conference on Weights and Measures agreed to introduce the ronna, quetta, ronto and quecto as prefixes for the International System of Units, which is better known as the metric system.
Ronna refers to the use of 27 zeros after a first digit – or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – and quetta means there are 30 zeros.
Ronto is the inverse of ronna, making it 0.000000000000000000000000001, while quecto is the inverse of quetta. The newest members of this prefix club join the more familiar kilo (1000), mega (1,000,000), milli (0.001) and micro (0.000001).
“At first glance this may not sound like a particularly exciting change,” wrote Oliver Jones, a professor of environmental chemistry at Australia’s RMIT University, in an email.
But “standard prefixes, which are the same the world over, help us say what we mean and for others to understand us”.
The latest additions were “driven by the growing requirements of data science and digital storage, which is already using prefixes at the top of the existing range,” Britain’s National Physical Laboratory said in a statement. All the data in the world will total about 175 zettabytes (21 zeros), or about 0.175 yottabytes, by 2025, predicts market intelligence company IDC.
