In a bold move, UC Davis physics students have made a slang term into an "official" metric prefix, coined a new term to express incredible size, and proven that physicists indeed have a sense of humor. Sacramento CBS News affiliate channel 13 reports the students assert that, much as 10^6 (ten to the sixth power) is known as "mega" and 10^9 (ten to the ninth power) is known as "giga," 10^27 (ten to the twenty-seventh power) should be termed "hella." Since this is the order of magnitude these students have found to be usable to express the size of the known universe, which they compute to be 1.4 hellameters, we can truly, scientifically refer to the universe as "hella big." Huzzah! Thank you to io9.com for reporting this in their own enjoyable-as-always fashion.
