Why It Matters: Exponents

- The distance to the open cluster Pleiades is parsecs from Earth. That's miles.
- The center of the Milky Way is more than kiloparsecs (a kiloparsec is parsecs) from Earth, and the Milky Way is roughly kiloparsecs across.
- The nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, is about parsecs from the sun.
- Most of the stars visible to the unaided eye in the nighttime sky are within parsecs of the sun.
Learning Outcomes
- Apply exponent rules to simplify expressions with integer exponents
- Write very large and very small numbers in scientific notation
- Apply exponent rules to numbers written in scientific notation in applications