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Hi and how many billions of years??


Aether monkey

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Hi all,

Am new to the community from bath Just got a skyliner 300p (first telescope after lots of research and scraping and saving and pleading!) and wanted to introduce myself as I'm sure I'll have lots of questions!

My first, quite simply is when we say the sun is approx 4.5 billion years old or there are billions of stars in the milky way etc, are we talking uk billion (ie 12 zeros) or an American billion (9 zeros) - I think that's right?! Or is there a standard billion that we use when referring to the universe.

Thanks!

Brady

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The "Short Scale" Billion ( 9 Zeros) has been officially used by the UK since 1974 i believe. The SI unit for Billion is also 9 so i think you can be reasonably assured that when you read billion in an Astronomical context these days it is standard as mentioned above.

Some other EU countries still officially use the Long Scale though.... interesting question.

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