In 1998 1998 Rebolo began to serve as a Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) Professor of Research in Physical Science 2002 Rebolo became a member of the Max Planck Society and External Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg.

[14][15] He was part of the discovery of several giant extrasolar planets in 2000,[9][16] Rebolo provided empirical evidence in 1999 of the physical connection between supernovae and black holes.

[18][12][19] Rebolo has developed experiments in astrophysical observation at the Observatorio del Teide in collaboration with the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge.

Rebolo leads the QUIJOTE consortium for measuring the polarization of the cosmic microwave background[20][21] with telescopes in Tenerife.

[22] He is co-director of a high-precision spectrograph[16][23] ESPRESSO for detecting exo-Earths [16][24] with the 8 m Very Large Telescope (VLT) ) in Chile, and the AOLI project for high spatial resolution imaging[25] on the 4.2 m William Herschel Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma, Canary Islands.