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(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.

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In 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.

Isn’t Gy a bit much even in astronomy? With 15 Gy you have the age of the universe right?

Your comment piqued my curiosity, and I looked at 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.

Ah, 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.

I myself can't remember seeing Gy in astronomical papers, but I've seen Ga (gigaannum).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#SI_prefix_multipliers

Ga is indeed used as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_years

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