Summary:
- Scientific notation is a way to express numbers as the product of two numbers: a coefficient and the number 10 raised to a power.
- It is a very useful tool for working with numbers that are either very large or very small.
- In scientific notation, the distance from Earth to the Sun is 1.5 × 1011 m. The power of 10, or exponent, is 11 because you would have to multiply 1.
- 5 by 1011 to get the correct number.
- Scientific notation is sometimes referred to as exponential notation.