Rotating black holes can have short bristles

The elegant ‘no short hair’ theorem states that, if a spherically-symmetric static black hole has hair, then this hair must extend beyond 3/2 the horizon radius. In the present paper we provide evidence for the failure of this theorem beyond the regime of spherically-symmetric static black holes. In particular, we show that rotating black holes can support extremely short-range stationary scalar configurations (linearized scalar ‘clouds’) in their exterior regions. To that end, we solve analytically the Klein–Gordon–Kerr–Newman wave equation for a linearized massive scalar field in the regime of large scalar masses.