Can Centauros or Chirons be the first observations of evaporating mini black holes?

Abstract

We argue that the signals expected from the evaporation of mini black holes - predicted in TeV-scale gravity models with large extra dimensions, and possibly produced in ultra high energy collisions in the atmosphere - are quite similar to the characteristics of the Centauro events, an old mystery of cosmic-ray physics.

Comments: 14 pages, LaTeX, one Table, uses rotate.sty and rotcapt.sty. References added, typos corrected, footnotes moved into the text