Connecting Granulation and Magnetic Activity in Radial Velocities: The Next Breakthrough for High-Precision Spectroscopy
Stellar variability has become the dominant limitation to achieving the radial velocity (RV) precision required for the detection and characterization of Earth-like exoplanets. While significant progress has been made in mitigating the effects of oscillations and magnetic activity, convective granulation and its interaction with stellar magnetic fields remain among the least understood sources of RV variability. To address these challenges, we organized the splinter session `Connecting Granulation and Magnetic Activity in Radial Velocities: The Next Breakthrough for High-Precision Spectroscopy' at Cool Stars 23. The session brought together researchers working on observations, numerical simulations, and data-driven techniques to discuss the current understanding of granulation-driven RV signals and identify the most promising directions for future progress. Through invited and contributed talks, followed by community discussions, participants emphasized the importance of combining physically motivated models with data-driven approaches, developing standardized benchmark datasets, and validating simulations against high-quality observations across a range of stellar types. The discussions also highlighted the need for coordinated observing strategies, improved characterization of individual spectral lines, and physically informed line-by-line analyses to disentangle convective and magnetic signals. This contribution summarises the scientific discussions and community perspectives that emerged during the session and outlines the key challenges that must be addressed to reach the sub-40 cm/s precision required for the next generation of RV planet searches.