Rafael Rebolo is a Spanish astrophysicist, director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and Physics Professor at the National Research Council CSIC (Spain). Member of the Max Planck Society, External Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Spain. He carries out research on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), sub-stellar objects and black holes and Earth-like exoplanets. He is co-author of over 400 articles published in the most relevant journals of astrophysics (including ten in Nature and Science), which have accumulated more than 30,000 citations in the scientific literature. He has supervised or co-supervised 20 doctoral PhD theses.
Prof. Rebolo and his team are responsible for the discovery in 1995 of the first brown dwarfs (objects with properties intermediate between stars and giant planets of which there are tens of billions in our Galaxy), the discovery of free-floating planets and several super-Earths orbiting nearby stars. He obtained with G. Israelian and others empirical evidence in 1999 of the physical connection between supernovae and black holes. He has developed several CMB experiments in collaboration with the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge and currently leads the QUIJOTE experiment for measuring the polarization imprinted by gravitational waves on the CMB with telescopes in Tenerife. He is co-PI of the high-precision spectrograph ESPRESSO for detecting exo-Earths with the 8 m VLT telescopes (ESO,Chile), co-investigator of the Planck and Euclid space missions (ESA), and member of the Council of the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) and the Cherenkov Telescope Array. He was also a member of the science group of the 39m ELT and the Scientific Board "Science Vision for European Astronomy". He was awarded the Iberdrola Prize of Science and Technology, the Jaime I and the Canarias Prizes for Research, the Jules Janssen Prize of the French Astronomical Society and Doctor Honoris Causa from the Polytechnic University of Cartagena.