SOAR TESS survey: Thousands of High-resolution Images of Planet Hosting Stars

The TESS mission has been enormously successful, finding over 7000 transiting exoplanet candidates across the entire sky. Confirming and characterizing these candidate planets requires ground based observations. High-resolution instruments from the ground probe far closer to the host star then TESS can resolve, revealing the true architecture of the stellar system and its environment. The SOAR TESS survey has observed over 3000 Southern stars, and detecting 700 close companions. These results have been assisted in validating the majority of confirmed TESS planets. In addition, this large dataset suggests that close-in binary stars are not amenable to the formation or survival of planetary systems. In stars at separations less than approximately twice size of Neptune's orbit (50 AU or less), we find greater than 90% reduction in detected planet candidates. As about a quarter of solar type stars are in such systems, this has a significant impact on our estimates of the planet population within our galaxy.