Soul Searcher
The kingdom is within
Soul Searcher, think of it like this.
Whatever speed light was when the star went supernova, the ring is 8 months travel by light away from the center, since its light fluctuations lag consistently 8 months behind the fluctuations of the center. So we'll call the radius 0.87 LY.
We can see how much of the sky the supernova takes up in arc seconds, and it's not much of a stretch to convert it into an angle.
Now draw a triangle with one point at the ring's edge, one point in the center and one point at Earth. By trigonometry, the distance to supernova 1987A is equal to 0.67ly*cos(angle)/sin(angle). This means that the distance from Earth to supernova 1987A is directly proportional to the speed of light when the supernova occured; no matter how fast light was travelling it has to have taken the same amount of time to get here.
Yes I understood once it was pointed out that the size was measured in LY as well.
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