Background

Attracted by physics and above all by astronomy, Damien Hutsemékers joined an amateur astronomy club when he was 14. He arrived at the University of Liège in 1980, after having completed two candidacies in physical sciences at the University Faculty of Notre Dame de la Paix in Namur. With his undergraduate degree under his belt, he began a doctorate at the ULg, which he defended in 1988, on radioactive transfer in moving atmospheres. This involved studying the rate of loss of mass in massive stars and quasars.

While his thesis was relatively theoretical, Damien Hutsemékers could not ignore the passage of Halley ’s Comet, which was visible to the naked eye in 1986. He was thus sent to the Observatory in Haute Provence to observe it. But it was only after his doctorate that he really launched himself into observation: he flew to Chile with his wife and children for a post-doctorate at the La Silla Observatory. As an on-site observer, he had the opportunity to touch on a little of everything: massive stars and their nebula, gravitational lenses, quasar polarisation, comets etc.

Once back at the University of Liège in 1991, he undertook various external contracts before being named as a qualified FNRS researcher in 1995. However, he kept his memories of the Chilean skies and in 2000 took two years unpaid leave to go back to Chile, this time at the Mont Paranal Observatory. It was there he began observing comets with the Very Large Telescope UVES spectograph and began his collaboration on cometary isotopic ratios. Today he is senior researcher at the FRS-FNRS in the “Extragalactic astrophysics and space observation” unit (AEOS) at ULg.