Quetabytes and Ronagrams: Extreme numbers get new official names

For the first time in more than 30 years, new terms have been officially added to the International System of Units (SI). Four new prefixes – rona, queta, ronto and quecto – describe very large and very small numbers that until now did not have their own names.

The SI uses seven base units of measurement, such as the meter, which can be modified with prefixes (such as kg) to describe larger or smaller amounts of these units, making it easier to understand and communicate. goes. So 649,000,000 bytes becomes 649 gigabytes, or 0.001 meter becomes 1 millimeter.

But these names can still be counted. For more extreme numbers that are not often used, the common shorthand is scientific notation, where the superscript number tells how many zeros there are. So 109, for example, represents 1,000,000,000, or 10-6 is 0.000001. While these may sound fine in a scientific paper, they are awkward in everyday conversation or more casual texts.

As technology advances and supernumerary numbers become more regular, new prefixes are needed. In this case, the driver was data – the amount of data created and consumed around the world is currently measured in zettabytes (1021), and beyond that there is only one more named unit – the yottabyte, or 1024.

So, at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) this past weekend, global delegates voted to introduce four new prefixes for SI. Number 1027 is now officially called Rona and 1030 Queta, while 10-27 is Ronto and 10-30 Quecto. This is in keeping with naming conventions that use prefixes ending in “a” for larger numbers and “o” for smaller ones.

According to Dr Richard Brown, Head of Metrology at the UK National Physics Laboratory (NPL) and lead scientist on the proposal, these names were chosen because R and Q were the last two letters of the alphabet that were not used for other prefixes. This is the first time since 1991 that new prefixes have been added to the table.

While ronabytes and quetabytes of data will probably be their first use, as with any SI prefix, these new ones can be used for any and all SI units of measurement. For example, Earth’s mass has been estimated at about 1 ronagram, and Jupiter’s at about 1 quintagram. At the other end of the scale, the mass of an electron is 1 rontogram, while 1 quantogram is the mass of one bit of data stored on a mobile phone.

For everyday use, we now have some fun new words to exaggerate things in stories at the pub. The team describes the new words in the video below.

SI prefix expansion

Source: NPL via Nature

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