Stroll along the beaches in sunny California and you're bound to run into a native using the word "hella." For those who aren't privy to West coast jargon, the term is used in place of "really" or "super." Let's demonstrate:

"See that dinosaur over there watching Star Wars burlesque shows, bro?"

"Whoa, yeah! That's hella cool, man."

Get it? Good. Turns out you may need to become very familiar with the term in the future. That's because a group of University of California students have started a campaign to make hella the next prefix for really big scientific units of measurement, like those used to describe how much space you have to download horrible Lady Gaga mashups on to your laptop. So, that'd be kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, yottabyte, and ... hellabyte.

In a few short months, the movement has stretched beyond the university, garnering a bounty of attention and a Facebook group with 50,000 members, all brought together by their desire to establish a prefix for the currently unnamed 10 to the 27th power.

We tracked down the reasoning from the movement's leaders and talked to some smart science-y types to find out if the campaign has any chance of succeeding.

"We believe the designation of the 'hella' prefix would have a positive impact on all parties involved, and thus warrants serious consideration," explains Physics Major Austin Sendek on the Facebook group's information page. He's the hella-awesome student at UC Davis who founded the movement.

Should the prefix actually be accepted as official terminology, the sun's mass would be 2.2 hellatons releasing energy at .3 hellawatts. Awesome.

But how plausible is it for "hella" to actually become a scientific prefix? For that answer, we hit up Ben Stein (no, not that Ben Stein), the director of media relations at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland.

"The chair of the [CCU] committee, Dr. Ian Mills, has said he will hold up this proposal and petition," Stein tells us. "But he has stated in news accounts that he does not think it will go very far."

The reasoning behind this, Stein explains, has nothing to do with the word "hella" itself.

"The prefixes to describe the very big numbers, such as zetta (10^21) and yotta (10^24), which were approved in 1991, have not been very widely used," he says. "It would be hard to argue to create a prefix for an even larger number (10^27) based on the relatively low usage of the other prefixes."

But Barry N. Taylor, a NIST Scientist Emeritus in the Fundamental Constants Data Center (FCDC) in the Atomic Physics Division has a slightly differing opinion.

"Quite frankly," Taylor explains, "the suggestion to make 'hella' the SI prefix for 10^27 is completely without scientific merit."

"Unfortunately, this whimsical idea, initiated on a lark by a student in California, has received much unjustified and sometimes mindless publicity over the last several weeks," he adds.

Hella-harsh, dude.

The next CCU (Consultative Committee for Units) meeting takes place this September and will decide on hella's fate. Despite what the experts say, let's not forget that we live in a time in which marketing can be just as powerful a force as science or officialdom. We just need to convince Steve Jobs that the iPad might actually sell if it came with a hellabyte of memory ...