3 ms·
(e.g. "Gy" -- is it giga-years, or gray) In my opinion this is not a real problem, since ideally no-one should such meaningless abbreviations in code. Just wri
by stinos 5y ago
(e.g. "Gy" -- is it giga-years, or gray)
In my opinion this is not a real problem, since ideally no-one should such meaningless abbreviations in code. Just write giga_years or GigaYears or whatever your style is, problem solved, doesn't get any clearer than that.
- timthorn 5y agoIn defence of Gy, it isn't meaningless in astronomy - it's a very well used unit. Though I do agree that it might be less common in code.
- gattr 5y agoI myself can't remember seeing Gy in astronomical papers, but I've seen Ga (gigaannum). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#SI_prefix_multipliers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#SI_prefix_multipliers
- timthorn 5y agoGa is indeed used as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_years
- Aeolun 5y agoIsn’t Gy a bit much even in astronomy? With 15 Gy you have the age of the universe right?
- em3rgent0rdr 5y agoYour comment piqued my curiosity, and I looked at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_unive... and found: "Stars are expected to form normally for 10^12 to 10^14 (1–100 trillion) years" So it seems Gy and even Ty units will be a reasonable scale for events during the period of star formation.
- Aeolun 5y agoAh, that is a good point. For some reason I was thinking only backwards. I never considered that there’s orders of magnitude more time in front of us.