Yotta- facts for kids

Yotta is a super big number word used in the metric system! It's a special unit prefix that means a 1 followed by 24 zeros. Imagine a million, then multiply that by a million, then by another million, and then by another million! That's how big a yotta is. You can also call it one septillion. Its symbol is a capital Y.

The name "yotta" comes from the Ancient Greek word "októ," which means "eight." This is because a yotta is like multiplying 1,000 by itself eight times (1,000⁸). Scientists officially added yotta to the International System of Units (SI) in 1991.

What Can We Measure with Yotta?

Yotta helps us talk about incredibly large things in the universe. Here are some examples:

• The mass of our home planet, Earth, is about 5,972.6 Yg. That's a lot of mass!
• All the water in the oceans combined has a mass of about 1.4 Yg.
• The Sun gives off a huge amount of energy. Its total power is around 385 YW.
• The part of the universe we can see, called the observable universe, is estimated to be 880 Ym across. That's an amazing distance!

Yottabyte: A Giant Storage Unit

When you hear about computers and data, you might hear about bytes. A yottabyte (YB) is a unit for digital information or how much data can be stored. It means one septillion bytes! That's like 1,000 zettabytes.

There's also a similar unit called the yobibyte (YiB). This unit uses a slightly different way of counting, based on powers of 1,024 instead of 1,000. So, one yobibyte is about 1.2 septillion bytes. It's even bigger than a yottabyte!

Related Ideas to Explore

• Metric prefix: Learn about other prefixes like kilo, mega, giga, and more!
• Googol: Discover another very large number.

See also

In Spanish: Prefijos del Sistema Internacional para niños