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

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]