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Kepler-424 b: A "Lonely" Hot Jupiter That Found A Companion

Hot Jupiter systems provide unique observational constraints for migration models in multiple systems and binaries. We report on the discovery of the Kepler-424 (KOI-214) two-planet system, which consists of a transiting hot Jupiter (Kepler-424b) in a 3.31-d orbit accompanied by a more massive outer companion in an eccentric (e=0.3) 223-d orbit. The outer giant planet, Kepler-424c, is not detected to transit the host star. The masses of both planets and the orbital parameters for the second planet were determined using precise radial velocity (RV) measurements from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) and its High Resolution Spectrograph (HRS). In stark contrast to smaller planets, hot Jupiters are predominantly found to be lacking any nearby additional planets, the appear to be "lonely" (e.g. Steffen et al.~2012). This might be a consequence of a highly dynamical past of these systems. The Kepler-424 planetary system is a system with a hot Jupiter in a multiple system, similar to upsilon Andromedae. We also present our results for Kepler-422 (KOI-22), Kepler-77 (KOI-127; Gandolfi et al.~2013), Kepler-43 (KOI-135; Bonomo et al.~2012), and Kepler-423 (KOI-183). These results are based on spectroscopic data collected with the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT), the Keck 1 telescope and HET. For all systems we rule out false positives based on various follow-up observations, confirming the planetary nature of these companions. We performed a comparison with planetary evolutionary models which indicate that these five hot Jupiters have a heavy elements content between 20 and 120 M_Earth.