1.30 Scientific Notation
1.30 Scientific Notation
- State the purpose of scientific notation.
- Explain how to convert numbers to and from scientific notation.
Most of the stars pictured in this view of the night sky are hundreds of light years from Earth. A light year is
the distance that light can travel in a year, or about 6 trillion (6,000,000,000,000) miles. As this example shows,
quantities in science may be very large. Many other quantities in science are very small. Both very large and very
small numbers have many zeroes, so they are hard to read and write without making mistakes. That’s where scientific
notation comes in.
What Is Scientific Notation?
Scientific notationis a way of writing very large or very small numbers that uses exponents. Numbers are written
in this format:
a× 10 bThe letterastands for a decimal number, and the letterbstands for an exponent, or power, of 10. For example, the
number 300 is written in scientific notation as 3.0× 102. The number 0.03 is written as 3.0× 10 −^2. Do you need a
review of exponents? If so, watch the video at this URL: