![]() To keep up with the scale of modern observational capabilities and computing power, metric prefixes were recently updated to include ronna- (10 27), a billion billion billion, and quetta- (10 30), a thousand times that. Synopsis: In the eighteenth century there were a mind-boggling number of ways to measure things from village to village, a problem solved by the introduction of the metric system during the French Revolution. Modern computers, telescopes and microscopes have required ever larger, and smaller, increments-we’re now up to quettameters, which is a thousand times the diameter of the universe!Īs our scientific instruments get ever more capable, we’ll need more terms for an ever expanding, and shrinking, metric system. One-thousandth of a meter is a millimeter. The bureau created a system of prefixes to denote multiples and divisions of the meter. Thirty copies were sent around the world as the basis for the metric system. They divided that appropriately, then cast a platinum bar of that exact length, to create the meter standard. So, they made a painstaking, seven-year-long survey of the exact distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona and used the latitudes of those two cities to calculate the distance from equator to pole-which took another year. ![]() The problem was they had no way to measure that. This made commerce and mapmaking so difficult that the French government created a special bureau to standardize things.Īnd they decided to create the meter-which they defined as one ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the North Pole. By some estimates, there were 250,000 different units in France alone. In the 1700’s, there was no standard of measurement.Įvery village had its own unit. The sun is so large that about 1,300,000 planet Earths could fit inside of it.Ĭredit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, via Wikimedia Commons In this illustration a coronal mass ejection from the sun dwarfs Earth (shown to scale). Former metric prefixes topped out at yottagrams, 5,972 for Earth and 1,989,000 for our sun. The sun at 1,989 quettagrams is about 333,000 times more massive than Earth at 5.972 ronnagrams.
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