Scientific Notation

Scientists often have to deal with very big numbers (how far is it from Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy?) or very tiny numbers (how big is an atom?).

As we know, big numbers have lots of zeros at the end (it's 2,538,000 light years from Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy), and small numbers require lots of zeros after the decimal point (some scientists estimate that atoms are about .00000001 centimeters in diameter.)

When dealing with very big or very small numbers, it's often convenient to compress them and make them uniform.  We use scientific notation to do this!

When writing in scientific notation, you move the decimal of any number to just after the first (highest) non-zero digit.  You then multiply that number by a multiple of 10 to expand it back to standard form. For more on the details of how scientific notation works, see Scientific Notation (Write in Standard Form).

What does that look like?