This past November, scientists gathered in Paris, France, for the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures. There, the group agreed on some additions to the metric system: four new unit prefixes. They are ronna-, quetta-, ronto-, and quecto-.
Prefixes are added to the beginning of a metric unit of measurement, like the meter, to show greater or smaller increments of that base unit. For example, a ronnameter is 1027 times longer than a meter—1027 is a 1 followed by 27 zeros! Scientists introduced these new prefixes to keep track of extremely large and small numbers, which are becoming more common in fields like computer science and atomic physics.