[nitpick, I think] The numbers used in the webpage calculations are meant to be in scientific notation, so 4.59 * 1024 J means “4.59 times 10 raised to the 24th power Jules.” The 24 should have been written as an exponent to avoid confusion (as should my ‘th’!). So this would mean that the comet in question would have 4 times as much energy as the asteriod [/nitpick, I think]
Travelling at the typical speed of a giant cotton ball asteroid, there will be very significant pressure waves exerted on it as it enters the earth’s atmosphere. These will tend to compress the giant cotton ball much more than any gravity effects. Pinch a cotton ball between your fingers and that might simulate the comressed qualities of the potential gossypium cataclysm.
I’ve got a big “yes, but” for that. It flattens and turns into a big parachute, i.e., it dissipates its energy as heat in the atmosphere, and does little damage on the ground.
And we really need to work out whether we’re all talking about cotton balls, or cotton bales. A cotton ball has a pretty low density, while a cotton bale has a density up to about 450 kgm[sup]-3[/sup] (28 pounds/cubic foot).
ooooooooooo…what ever it is that you are smoking…i want some…you guys have way too much time on your hands.
love,
muffin
Even if it burns up in the atmosphere, the kinetic energy of impact would still be delivered (as heat, shockwaves, and other phenomena unfriendly to planetary property values). Given that a ball of cotton 500 km in diameter (a rough translation of “Texas-sized”) would have considerable mass even if it’s really fluffy cotton, you’re still taking dinosaur-killer or worse.
The OP makes it pretty clear we’re talking about Cotton Balls.
One more thing to consider, would said giant cotton ball have air trapped in its fibers, and if so would the air act as an insulator which would prevent much of the ball from burning up?
What if it was a giant Q-Tip about to ram Earth?
Would Earth be shifted off its axis?
Would we all have eargasms simutaneously?
I can tell you from eighth grade biology projects and “scientific experimentation” that if that giant cotton ball has been soaked in nail polish remover then we’re all seriously screwed.
I do not get where you are coming from.
Even if the impact doesn’t kill everything, it will burn or vaporize a lot of cotton. Cotton is organic and flammable. Any unburned vapor that spreads into the atmosphere will contain a lot of carbon, which will bind with oxygen in the air.
So, exactly how much O[sub]2[/sub] will be converted to CO[sub]2[/sub]? Would there be enough left for all us anerobes to live on? Even if we survived that problem, the added carbon dioxide might push the atmosphere over the greenhouse cliff, and the planet could end up with a climate similar to Venus.
Remember the damage that a piece of insulation foam did to the Space Shuttle? I’d say Texas is a goner. Can we arrange to have it happen before the election?
Unless this cotton asteroid has enough gravity to hold an atmosphere, I think we can assume all the air has escaped into space. Same with moisture.
So, can someone calculate the density of cotton balls and figure out the mass for a Texas-sized cotton ball?
When capturing insects for our biology project, we had to place them into an old jar that had cotton balls soaked in nail polish remover. The fumes kill them without squishing them, leaving them nicely preserved. I had a very Gary Larsonesque vision of a giant kid with glasses and an old mayonnaise jar big enough to stuff the earth into when I saw the OP.
As you were.
I wonder if some of you are having trouble wrapping your heads around the impact force of something moving at sufficient velocity, no matter how “soft and fluffy” it might be.
Recall that blades of grass have been found nailed into wood via the acceleration of hurricane-force winds, among similar astonishments. No matter how long you try, you aren’t going to push a piece of straw into a two-by-four at low speed. I have to conclude that our real-world experience with a cotton ball’s sponginess, and our intuitive impressions of its physical behavior under familiar circumstances, simply have no relation to its behavior in a radically different situation.
A comet is basically a big snowball, after all, the which material I’d imagine would have more or less the same density and pliability as a cotton ball. And Shoemaker-Levy 9 showed us the massive amounts of energy released when relatively small snowballs plow into a planetary body.
Any “give” in the cotton ball will be dwarfed, I think, by the other forces at play. A planet getting hit by a “Texas-sized” cotton ball will suffer quite a wallop.
I love this place
Double tangent
I seem to recall (and I can’t come up with a current cite), but I thought the idea of straw being impaled on a tree was a result of the winds twisting the trunk or branch so much by the wind that "cracks"would be exposed and the straw would end up being blown in as the tree snapped back (speaking with respect to tornados). Anybody
How about a collision between earth and a Texas-size wad of cotton-candy?
What about a roll of Cottonell bathroom tissue the size of Texas? It’s not cotton, but it is cottony-soft.
Then, of course, you have the giant boll weevils that live on the Texas-sized cotton ball!
(Yes, they can get that big – no gravitational limits in free fall, remember!)
That’s exactly what Hubby and I were debating, which started this whole thing. My thoughts on the matter was that the shock wave of compressed air moving before an object might be what causes a substantial part of the damage. (Asteroid movies illustrate this concept sometimes-- you see trees and buildings blown flat even though the object itself hasn’t touched them.)
His thoughts were that the actual mass of the object played a more substantial role in the destruction. And I could see his point-- it doesn’t hurt if you get hit in the head by a Whiffle Ball, but a real baseball will send you to the hospital. However, if that Whiffle Ball were moving at the speed of a bullet, it’d probably knock your block off.
That’s when we started talking about compression, the slowing caused by friction, etc., and I decided that I should present this to wiser heads than mine. NASA wasn’t available for comment, so, I turned to the next best thing. 
(I was hoping Bad Astronomer might have some input.)
You guys seem to be doing a remarkable job. I appreciate your help.
The real question here is one of kinetic energy, the product of mass and velocity^2. In the original example of asteroid and comet, both bodies had the same size and density, therefore the same mass. The difference was in speed. The comet moving twice as fast imparted four times the energy (twice squared). If we assume that the cotton ball has a very low specific gravity, say .05, and a diameter equal to Texas, roughly 1200 km, and is moving at cometary speeds, 50,000 km/s, the energy imparted by the cotton ball would be
1/2*(50 kg/m^3 * 4/3 pi * (600000 m)^3) * (50000 m/s)^2) = 5.65x10^28 J.
This is just a rough estimate, but it is considerably more than the piddling 10 km comet, especially when you realize that the original example used 4/3 pi D^3 rather than 4/3 pi r^3 for the volume. Also, at 50 km/sec, the cotton ball would only have a few seconds to interact with the atmosphere, so any atmospheric effects could be neglected.
So to answer the OP, the cotton ball would pretty much ruin everyone’s weekend, permanently.
So that’s where they got the Bugs in the movie version of Starship Troopers…!
That cotton ball is going to be coming in so hard and so fast that only the colliding mass matters. Any fluffiness will be swamped by the heating, compression, and distortion as the cotton ball hits the ground.
Here is a set of cross-sections of a simulation of a 1-km comet coming in at 60 km/s. Notice how it is distorted by the atmosphere even before it hits the ocean…
Now, imagine that comet being 500 km in diameter. The distortions caused by the atmosphere wouldn’t have a chance to affect more than the surface layer, and only plunging deep into the mantle would finally stop it. It wouldn’t matter if it was made of cotton or ice or rock. The impact would look like the top picture on this page.