Suppose the distance from Earth to Planet-X is 4,502,233,434,224,445,657,213,455,467,634,345,654,634,234,333,345,547,665,754,234,647,673,535,345 light years away and you needed to write that distance 20 times in various places in a book report. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to "abbreviate" it? Scientific notation is how we can write numbers in a "shorter" way. In this case we could round the number to say 4,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, but we'd still have deal with all of those zeros. Using scientific notation we could write the distance as "approximately 4.5 x 10^72" and capture the size of the number without needing to write all of its digits. Here is how it works:
So... 0.00000000012 = 1.2x10^-10
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