Have to share this. Time to think about numbers.

Watt is the unit of power (symbol: W). (The watt unit is named after James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine.) One watt is defined as the energy consumption rate of one joule per second. 1W = 1J / 1s. One watt is also defined as the current flow of one ampere with voltage of one volt. A watt is pretty small but a hundred of them give you a decent light bulb.

Ten million (10⁷ )  such bulbs would give you a billion (10⁹) watts.

So a billion watts is a lot of bulbs. (If you wanted to build a cube from 10 million bulbs it would be roughly 215.5 bulbs wide, deep and high.)

A billion watts is pretty impressive. Then we take that billion and replicate it a billion times. We now have a billion (10⁹) billions (10⁹) = 10¹⁸! Let’s now multiply than by one million (10⁶). We get an enormous number a million billion billion (10²⁴)!! That number is called a yottawatt. (I would have gone with lottawatts.)

So a yottawatt is huge.

Scientists claim those colliding black holes they monitored with the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (whew) blasted out 3.6 x 10²⁵ yottawatts. 36 septillion yottawatts !!!!! (Our sun puts out about 385 yottawatts.)

Now that I have that enormous number off my chest, I can get rid of the article that brought it too me. Clearing off the desk being cluttered up by a really big number.