Scientists Are Using Bizarre Units to Describe Their Discoveries. Here’s Why : ScienceAlert

You may have heard about an asteroid set to fly near Earth that is the size of 18 platypuses, or maybe the one that’s the size of 33 armadillos, or even one the size of 22 tuna fish.

These outlandish comparisons are the invention of Jerusalem Post journalist Aaron Reich (who bills himself as “creator of the giraffe metric”), but real astronomers sometimes measure celestial objects with units that are just as strange.

The idea of a planet that’s 85 percent the mass of Earth seems straightforward. But what about a pulsar-wind nebula with a brightness of a few milliCrab? That’s where things…

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News Source: www.sciencealert.com


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