Rafael Rebolo López

Rafael Rebolo López (born September 12, 1961, in Cartagena, Spain) is a Spanish astrophysicist. He is the director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias^[1] (Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands; IAC), and a professor at the Spanish National Research Council and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

Education

Rebolo earned a degree in physics from the University of Granada in 1984 and a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of La Laguna in 1987.^[2]

Career

Since 1984 he is researcher at the IAC, where he served as head of the Research Division between 1997 and 1999. He is a Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) Professor of Research in Physical Science since 1998. Since 2002 he is member of the Max Planck Society and External Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg.

He has developed research projects in cosmology, in stellar physics and exoplanets, involving the study of the cosmic microwave background, the characterization of sub-stellar objects and black holes and, more recently, the search for Earth-like exoplanets. He is co-author of over 400 articles published in international 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) and several giant extrasolar planets in 2000, as well as providing empirical evidence in 1999 of the physical connection between supernovae and black holes. He has been a pioneer in Spain in the experimental research of the cosmic microwave background and has developed at the Observatorio del Teide several experiments in collaboration with the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge.

He leads the QUIJOTE consortium for measuring the polarization of the cosmic microwave background with telescopes in Tenerife. He is co-director of a high-precision spectrograph ESPRESSO for detecting exo-Earths with the 8 m VLT telescopes in Chile, and the AOLI project for high spatial resolution imaging on the 4.2 m William Herschel telescope, at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma, Canary Islands. He is co-investigator of the European Space Agency’s Planck and Euclid space missions, and member of the Board of the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) and the Cherenkov Telescope Array. He was also a member of the science committee of the 40 m E-ELT telescope, the steering committees of several European networks in astronomy (OPTICON; EARA) and the US (AURA) and the Scientific Committee "Science Vision for European Astronomy" and co-chair of the "Stars and Planets" panel. He is Scientific director of the "IAC: Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence" program since 2011.

He has participated in several dozen scientific committees of conferences, has directed several international schools in astrophysics and has delivered research seminars in more than 30 institutes and centers in Spain, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, USA, Greece, Switzerland, Chile, Belgium, China and Japan.

Awards and honors

He is a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Spain, Academician of the Academy of Science and Engineering Lanzarote, Honorary Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Region of Murcia, Doctor Honoris Causa from the Polytechnic University of Cartagena.

He was awarded the Iberdrola Prize of Science and Technology , the Jaime I Research Prize , the Canary Islands Prize for Research and the Jules Janssen Prize of the French Astronomical Society.

Publications

• "Lithium abundances in metal deficient dwarfs" (1988). R. Rebolo, et al. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 192, 192.
• "Oxygen abundances in unevolved halo and old disc stars" (1989). C. Abia, et al. Astrophysical Journal, 347, 186.
• "Spectroscopy of a brown dwarf candidate in the Alpha Per open cluster" (1992). Rebolo, et al. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 389, L83.
• "Direct observations of structure in the cosmic microwave background" (1994). S. Hancock, et al. Nature, 367, 333.
• "Discovery of a brown dwarf in the Pleiades star cluster" (1995). Rebolo, et al. Nature, 377, 129.
• "Brown dwarfs in the Pleiades cluster confirmed by the lithium test" (1996). Rebolo, et al. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 469, L53.
• "Oxygen abundances in unevolved metal-poor stars from near-UV OH lines" (1998). G. Israelian, et al. Astrophysical Journal, 507, 805.
• "Discovery of a low-mass brown dwarf companion of the young nearby star G196-3" (1998). Rebolo, et al. Science, 282, 1309.
• "Evidence of a supernova origin for the black-hole in GRO J1655-40 (Nova Scorpii 1994)" (1999). Israelian, et al. Nature, 401, 142.
• "Discovery of young isolated planetary mass objects in the Sigma Orionis cluster" (2000). M. R. Zapatero Osorio, et al. Science, 290, 103.
• "The substellar mass function in Sigma Orionis" (2001). V. J. S. Béjar, et al. Astrophysical Journal. 556, 830.
• "Evidence for planet engulfment by the star HD 82943" (2001). Israelian, et al. Nature, 411,163.
• "Statistical properties of exoplanets II: Metallicity, orbital parameters, and space velocities" (2003). N. C. Santos, et al. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 398, 363.
• "First results from the Very Small Array III: The CMB power spectrum" (2003). Scott, et al. M.N.R.A.S., 341, 1076.
• "The CMB power spectrum out to l=1400 measured by the VSA" (2003). Grainge, et al. M.N.R.A.S., 341, L23.
• "High-sensitivity measurements of the cosmic microwave background power spectrum with the extended VSA" (2004). C. Dickinson, et al. M.N.R.A.S., 353, 732.
• "Cosmological parameter estimation using Very Small Array data out to l=1500" (2004). Rebolo, et al. M.N.R.A.S., 353, 747.
• "Detection of anomalous microwave emission in the Perseus molecular cloud with the COSMOSOMAS experiment" (2005). R. A. Watson, et al. Astrophysical Journal, 624, L89.
• "Discs of planetary-mass objects in Sigma Orionis" (2007). Zapatero Osorio, et al. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 472, L.9.
• "Discovery of a wide companion near the deuterium-burning mass limit in the Upper Scorpius Association" (2008). Béjar, et al. Astrophysical Journal, 673 L.185.
• "Enhanced lithium depletion in Sun-like stars with orbiting planets" (2009). Israelian, et al. Nature, 462, 189.
• "Planck early results" (2011). Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol. 536 (co-author in 20 papers).
• "A spectrograph for exoplanet observations calibrated at the centimetre-per-second level" (2012). Wilken, et al. Nature 485, 611.
• "The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III" (2013). Dawson, et al. Astronomical Journal 145, 10.
• "Planck 2013 results. XVI Cosmological parameters" (2014). Planck Collaboration. Astronomy and Astrophysics 571A, 16.

References

External links

• Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias