Dust hot spots at 10 au scales around the Class 0 binary IRAS 16293-2422 A: a departure from the passive irradiation model

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution ALMA observations to reveal hot dust spots around a Class 0 binary, suggesting shock heating plays a significant role in early protostellar disk temperature regulation, contrasting passive irradiation models.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed temperature map at ~10 au scales around a Class 0 binary, highlighting the importance of mechanical heating over radiative heating in early protostellar environments.

Findings

Detection of hot dust spots with temperatures up to 122 K.

Evidence supporting shock heating as a dominant process.

No significant grain growth detected in circumbinary material.

Abstract

Characterizing the physical conditions at disk scales in Class 0 sources is crucial for constraining the protostellar accretion process and the initial conditions for planet formation. We use ALMA 1.3 mm and 3 mm observations to investigate the physical conditions of the dust around the Class 0 binary IRAS 16293-2422 A (sep <100 au) down to ~10 au scales. The circumbinary material's spectral index, alpha, has a median of 3.1 and a dispersion of ~0.2, providing no firm evidence of mm-sizes grains therein. Continuum substructures with brightness temperature peaks of T_b~60-80 K at 1.3 mm are observed near the disks at both wavelengths. These peaks do not overlap with strong variations of alpha, indicating they trace high-temperature spots instead of regions with significant optical depth variations. The lower limits to the inferred dust temperature in the hot spots are 122, 87 and 49 K. Depending on the assumed dust opacity index, these values can be several times higher. They overlap with high gas temperatures and enhanced complex organic molecular (COM) emission. This newly resolved dust temperature distribution is in better agreement with the expectations from mechanical instead of the most commonly assumed radiative heating. In particular, we find that the temperatures agree with shock heating predictions. This evidence and recent studies highlighting accretion heating in Class 0 disks suggest that mechanical heating (shocks, dissipation powered by accretion, etc.) is important during the early stages and should be considered when modeling and measuring properties of deeply embedded protostars and disks.