Why Use Scientific Notation?
Scientific Notation was developed in order to easily represent numbers that are either very large or very small. Here are two examples of large and small numbers. They are expressed in decimal form instead of scientific notation to help illustrate the problem: The Andromeda Galaxy (the closest major galaxy to our Milky Way galaxy) contains at least 200,000,000,000 stars. On the other hand, the weight of an alpha particle, which is emitted in the radioactive decay of Plutonium-239, is 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,006,645 kilograms. As you can see, it could get tedious writing out those numbers repeatedly. So, a system was developed to help represent these numbers in a way that was easy to read and understand: Scientific Notation.
