At the very end of Wagner's series of operas The Ring of the Nibelung, Brünnhilde takes the golden ring from the finger of the dead Siegfried and throws it into the Rhine, where it sinks to the bottom of the river.

Assuming that the ring is small enough to be treated as a point compared with the depth of the river and that the Rhine is 8.60 meters deep where the ring goes in, what is the area of the largest circle at the surface of the water over which light from the ring could escape from the water?


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