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

TL;DR

This paper reports the first direct detection and characterization of a tertiary component in the massive star system HD 150 136 using long baseline optical interferometry, providing insights into massive star formation.

Contribution

It demonstrates the use of VLTI/AMBER to image and measure the third star in a massive binary, advancing methods for studying distant, massive stellar systems.

Findings

Third component detected at 7.3 mas separation

Component is an O main-sequence star

Tertiary may be near periastron orbit

Abstract

Massive stars are of fundamental importance for almost all aspects of astrophysics, but there still exist large gaps in our understanding of their properties and formation because they are rare and therefore distant. It has been found that most O-stars are multiples. HD 150 136 is the nearest system to Earth with >100 M_sol, and provides a unique opportunity to study an extremely massive system. Recently, evidence for the existence of a third component in HD 150 136, in addition to the tight spectroscopic binary that forms the main component, was found in spectroscopic observations. Our aim was to image and obtain astrometric and photometric measurements of this component using long baseline optical interferometry to further constrain the nature of this component. We observed HD150136 with the near-infrared instrument AMBER attached to the ESO VLT Interferometer. The recovered closure phases are robust to systematic errors and provide unique information on the source asymmetry. Therefore, they are of crucial relevance for both image reconstruction and model fitting of the source structure. The third component in HD 150 136 is clearly detected in the high-quality data from AMBER. It is located at a projected angular distance of 7.3 mas, or about 13 AU at the line-of-sight distance of HD 150 136, at a position angle of 209 degrees East of North, and has a flux ratio of 0.25 with respect to the inner binary. We resolved the third component of HD 150 136 in J, H and K filters. The luminosity and color of the tertiary agrees with the predictions and shows that it is also an O main-sequence star. The small measured angular separation indicates that the tertiary may be approaching the periastron of its orbit. These results, only achievable with long baseline near infrared interferometry, constitute the first step towards the understanding of the massive star formation mechanisms.