Talk:Moon/@comment-96.250.42.94-20150413072035/@comment-24891101-20150413073718

Considering a significant portion of the moon is fragmented, and they remain in basically the same orbit, it's not too unbelievable, actually. They'd all still orbit a common barycenter, which would be in approximately the same position. It's still about the same amount of mass, in about the same relative position.

You are right that it's unstable, though, since over time collisions would cause the fragments to wind down and pulverize the bodies. I'm not sure what the timescale would be, though.

Now that I think about it a bit more, though, those fragments are quite possibly within each other's Roche limits. Again, not sure of timescale.