Splitting the Gravitational Atom: Instabilities of Black Holes with Synchronized or Resonant Hair

Abstract

Black holes (BHs) with synchronized bosonic hair challenge the Kerr paradigm, linking superradiance from ultralight fields -- creating gravitational atoms -- to bosonic stars across parameter space. In the ''very hairy'' regime, where a small horizon lies inside a bosonic star containing most of the energy, they deviate sharply from Kerr, but their dynamics remain unexplored. We show that for such solutions the horizon gets naturally ejected from the center of its scalar environment, and observe a similar dynamics in a cousin model of BHs with resonant scalar hair, albeit with a different fate. This dynamical splitting is likely to be generic for sufficiently hairy BHs in the broader class of models with synchronized or resonant hair, but possible exceptions may exist.