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Geometry Difficulty 3.5 AMC 10/12 Find the answer United States

Isosceles triangle ABCABC has AB=AC=36AB = AC = 3\sqrt{6}, and a circle with radius 525\sqrt{2} is tangent to line ABAB at BB and to line ACAC at CC. What is the area of the circle that passes through vertices AA, BB, and CC?

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Solution

Let OO be the center of the circle with radius 525\sqrt{2}. Consider the circle with diameter AO\overline{AO}. Because ABO\angle ABO and ACO\angle ACO are right angles, the opposite angles of quadrilateral ABOCABOC are supplementary, and hence this quadrilateral is cyclic. Thus OO is also on the circle that passes through AA, BB, and CC, and by symmetry AO\overline{AO} is a diameter. By the Pythagorean Theorem,
AO=(52)2+(36)2=226, AO = \sqrt{(5\sqrt{2})^2 + (3\sqrt{6})^2} = 2\sqrt{26},
so the circle that passes through AA, BB, and CC has radius 26\sqrt{26} and area 26π26\pi.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.