Ronna, quetta, ronto, quecto – the extremely large and extremely small numbers were given names

Specialists participating in the conference of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Versailles decided on new prefixes for the designation of extremely small and enormous orders of magnitude, which are increasingly used in modern science. So now we have ronna (10^27) and quetta (10^30), as well as ronto (10^-27) and quecto (10^-30), writes MTI.

The last time the organization touched on the prefixes of the SI system of units was in 1991, when zetta and jota, as well as zepto and jocto complemented the previous ones, but due to the rapid development of technology, these will soon not be enough to express the largest numbers either. . Of course, zetta, yotta, and even exa are currently only used by scientists, and usually most people only come across peta in terms of petabytes when it comes to huge amounts of data.

However, by 2030, humanity will already generate one byte of data per year, so the update was clearly timely. Among other things, because an amazing amount of data is already generated in a year, and various fancy names have already come up to denote numbers with 27 zeros after the basic unit of measure – such as bronto and hella. This was problematic because the initial letters of these were already used in the metric system, ah, for example, representing the hecto. Rt and Qt have not been used for anything so far, so they were chosen,

and after that, the only task was to come up with names that end in a for big numbers and o for small ones, and sound somewhat like Latin or Greek numbers.

Among the new prefixes, ronna (R) and quetta (Q) denote units with 27 and 30 zeros after the basic unit, respectively, and ronto (r) and quecto (q) represent a value that is in the 27th or 30th place behind the comma after the number indicating the unit of measure. The mass of the Earth, expressed with the new prefix, is roughly ronnagrams, i.e. counted in grams, 6, then 27 zeros. Consequently, something with a mass of 6 rontograms corresponds to a decimal number where the number is the 27th place after the decimal point.

According to Richard Brown, a metrology expert at the British National Physical Laboratory, the new prefixes will satisfy the needs for expressing large quantities for at least 20-25 years, but the interesting question is what will happen after that, since there are no more letters left in the alphabet to indicate a another prefix. A solution to this could be if scientists combine two prefixes, so for example, numbers containing 33 zeros are expressed in kiloquettas. Of course, this is still a long way off, so the International Bureau of Weights and Measures will still have time to figure out the best solution.