One yottagram represents 10^24 grams, or one trillion teragrams. Astronomers and planetary scientists use this massive scale to express the mass of oceans, moons, and small planets without relying on cumbersome scientific notation. For scale, the total mass of the Earth's oceans is roughly 1.4 yottagrams, while the mass of the Earth itself is nearly 6,000 yottagrams.
Heard on the job
The simulation requires us to input the moon's mass in yottagrams before calculating the orbital decay.
Insider tip
The symbol for yottagram is Yg, and it is almost exclusively found in astrophysics and planetary science papers.