ARIZONA CAMPUS
‘AWOHALI’ A NAME OF MANY MEANINGS
Staying On Course Alexander Kam (’24) came to Embry-Riddle to play golf at the collegiate level and earn a prestigious degree in Mechanical Engineering on the Propulsion track. When looking for a club that would help with individual growth and career development, he found Women in Aviation International (WAI), a club open to all students. The WAI chapter led him to attend national conferences and create industry connections, which landed him an internship with The Boeing Company’s Test and Evaluation teams. “I recently finished my internship with The Boeing Company this summer, doing design engineering for their lab test team in Seattle, Washington. During my internship, I did a lot of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) modeling and other types of design work,” he says. “I learned so much about myself and the engineering industry that I can already see my skills from the internship contribute to my part in my senior capstone project.” Kam plans to return to The Boeing Company after graduation for a full-time position as an electrophysics engineer and hopes to help them develop and test new aircraft.
Embry-Riddle is paving the way as home to the only U.S. team to name one of the first exoplanets investigated by the James Webb Space Telescope. The team included members from Embry‑Riddle’s Prescott Campus, the Museum of Indigenous People and the Northern Arizona Astronomical Consortium, who entered the IAU’s NameExoWorlds 2022 contest to propose an exoplanet name stemming from indigenous culture. Prescott’s Museum of Indigenous People executive director, Manuel Lucero, provided the team with a Cherokee story about an eagle, which sparked the name for an exoplanet that was then known only as GJ 436 b. The new name, Awohali or “he who flies the highest,” holds a variety of meanings. The indigenous origin highlights the powerful connection of the sky, the Great Spirit and the people. However, it can also be noticed that a team collaborating with Embry‑Riddle chose a name meaning eagle; the school’s mascot. “There’s this beautiful symmetry of the Cherokee story and the science of the exoplanet,” said Jim and Linda Lee Planetarium director, Eric Edelman, while discussing the exoplanet with its own distinctive tail feather, a trailing swoosh of cloudiness created by hydrogen being stripped from the planet.
At a “star party” with over 300 attendees, a senior Astronomy major on the team, Becca Spejcher (’24), introduced Awohali, highlighting that the exoplanet is 33 lightyears from Earth and orbits a red dwarf star. She shared that “the most exciting fact about Awohali is the one that inspired the name: its comet-like tail that is more massive than the host star itself.”
DID YOU KNOW?
GJ 436 b is a Neptune-sized exoplanet that orbits a M-type star. Its mass is 22.1 Earths, it takes 2.6 days to complete one orbit of its star, and is 0.0291 AU from its star.
TRAVEL TO AWOHALI FROM EARTH
TRAVEL SPEED
TRAVEL TIME
60 MPH:
356 Million Years
671 Million MPH:
33 Years
(lightspeed)
PLANETARY CHARACTERISTICS
ORBITAL PERIOD
2.16 Days
TEMPERATURE
800 o K or 980 o F
TOTAL MASS
2.12 Earths
GJ 436 b / Awohali
Hypothetical Representation
A Name With History
Higbee shares his name with T. Higbee Embry, one of Embry-Riddle’s founders.
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