Final answer:
A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or 1 × 10⁻⁹ m. This tiny unit of measurement is crucial in fields like physics, chemistry, and biology for describing the size of atoms and molecules.
Step-by-step explanation:
A nanometer (nm) is a unit of length in the metric system, equal to one billionth of a meter (m). To convert nanometers to meters, we use the conversion factor 1 nm = 10⁻⁹ m. Therefore, a single nanometer is equal to 0.000000001 meters, or in scientific notation, 1 nm = 1 × 10⁻⁹ m. This small measurement is often used in fields such as physics, chemistry, and biology to describe the scale of atoms and molecules.
A practical example: A human hair is roughly 50 micrometers in thickness. Since a micrometer (μm) is 10⁻⁶ meters, a human hair's thickness in meters would be 50 × 10⁻⁶ meters. Comparatively, nanometers are used to measure things that are much smaller than a human hair, like the diameter of atoms.