A New Mechanism for Forming Hot Corinos: Shocks from Binary Interactions

Hot corinos are regions of elevated temperatures surrounding low-mass protostars, distinguished by their rich astrochemical inventory. They provide a unique window into the chemical and physical conditions of the early formation stages of low-mass stars like our Sun. The origin of hot corinos, however, is still a mystery. Only a limited number of hot corinos have been studied in detail, and even fewer have been well-resolved spatially. In this talk, we present the smoking gun evidence of the origin of the hot corino system, IRAS 16293A. High-resolution (~10 AU) ALMA observations show dust hot spots, coinciding with the location of complex organic molecule emission in the circumbinary disk away from both binary protostars. We conduct numerical simulations to further confirm that the temperature and location of the hot spots can be reproduced by shocks from binary interactions. Our study marks the first system in which the location of the hot corinos is spatially resolved by observations, and the formation mechanism is validated by numerical simulations. Our discovery opens a new window for understanding the astrochemical and dynamical properties of disks around low-mass binary protostars.