We may still be a ways from worrying how many yottabytes your computer can hold, but the international standards community has added two new prefixes for even bigger numbers than that — ronna for 1027 and quetta for 1030.
At a conference in Paris last week, representatives from numerous governments got together to vote on the official names for these enormous magnitude indicators. The last time they did this was in 1991, when the now-familiar zetta and yotta were added, as well as zepto and yocto for their respective negative powers of 10.
As you may have guessed, we also now have terms for 10-27 and 10-30: ronto and quecto.
While there are few things that can’t adequately be described in terms of the existing prefixes, it’s kind of nice to have single units for some famil …
