Longest prime number ever found has 22 million digits

2^74,207,281 – 1 is the longest prime number ever found and is 22 million digits long.

Newly discovered by University of Missouri professor number 2^74,207,281 – 1, is the biggest prime humans have ever found and 5 million digits longer than the previous record-holding prime number, discovered three years ago.
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself.

On January 7th at 22:30 UTC, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) celebrated its 20th anniversary with the math discovery of the new largest known prime number, 2^74,207,281-1, having 22,338,618 digits, on a university computer volunteered by Curtis Cooper for the project. The same GIMPS software just uncovered a flaw in Intel’s latest Skylake CPUs, and its global network of CPUs peaking at 450 trillion calculations per second remains the longest continuously-running “grassroots supercomputing” project in Internet history.

Official announcement of the new prime friend: mersenne.org/primes

source dailymail