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Massive stars are of fundamental importance for almost all aspects ofastrophysics, but there still exist large gaps in our understanding of theirproperties and formation because they are rare and therefore distant. It hasbeen found that most O-stars are multiples. HD 150 136 is the nearest system toEarth with >100 M_sol, and provides a unique opportunity to study an extremelymassive system. Recently, evidence for the existence of a third component in HD150 136, in addition to the tight spectroscopic binary that forms the maincomponent, was found in spectroscopic observations. Our aim was to image andobtain astrometric and photometric measurements of this component using longbaseline optical interferometry to further constrain the nature of thiscomponent. We observed HD150136 with the near-infrared instrument AMBERattached to the ESO VLT Interferometer. The recovered closure phases are robustto systematic errors and provide unique information on the source asymmetry.Therefore, they are of crucial relevance for both image reconstruction andmodel fitting of the source structure. The third component in HD 150 136 isclearly detected in the high-quality data from AMBER. It is located at aprojected angular distance of 7.3 mas, or about 13 AU at the line-of-sightdistance of HD 150 136, at a position angle of 209 degrees East of North, andhas a flux ratio of 0.25 with respect to the inner binary. We resolved thethird component of HD 150 136 in J, H and K filters. The luminosity and colorof the tertiary agrees with the predictions and shows that it is also an Omain-sequence star. The small measured angular separation indicates that thetertiary may be approaching the periastron of its orbit. These results, onlyachievable with long baseline near infrared interferometry, constitute thefirst step towards the understanding of the massive star formation mechanisms.

Direct Detection of the Tertiary Component in the Massive Multiple HD 150 136 with VLTI