The Exploding Whale: An infamous moment in Oregon history creates a strangely beloved icon

The Oregon State Highway Division can tell the folks in Waterford one whale-moving solution that DOESN'T work: ▶ this video

I've somewhat deliberately left the pulverising mechanism unspecified. But the point remains: under the influence of the cloud's own gravity a cloud of merely separated particles will re-coalesce. You can look up in the night sky much of the time to see an example of this yourself, the Earth's moon. And again, depending on the mechanism , a fair fraction of particles, quite possibly / probably the majority, will approach the original centroid of the mass. In practice, pulverising planets and/or planetoids is likely a challenging proposition. Early experimentation on animal models tends to support this hypothesis: ▶ this video

Direct link to the video without the shitty local news site: ▶ this video Side rant: Their ad-tracking cookie opt-out is the epitome of a dark design pattern. It took over 2 minutes to run. Including saying "done" in a pop out and the only leaving a cancel button for another 15 seconds. There's absolutely zero reason it should take even 1/10th of that time, other than purposefully bad UX.