Surface tension gases. The pressure inside an ideal (one surface) soap bubble can be derived from thermodynamic free energy considerations. At constant temperature and particle number, , the differential Helmholtz energy is given by where is the difference in pressure inside and outside of the bubble, and is the surface tension. In equilibrium, , and so, For a spherical bubble, the volume and surface area are given simply by and Substituting these relations into the previous expression, we find which is equivalent to the Young–Laplace equation when . For real soap bubbles, the pressure is doubled due to the presence of two
Surface brightness photometric luminance and is therefore constant with distance: as an object becomes fainter with distance, it also becomes correspondingly smaller in visual area. In geometrical terms, for a nearby object emitting a given amount of light, radiative flux decreases with the square of the distance to the object, but the physical area corresponding to a given solid angle or visual area (e.g. 1 square arcsecond) decreases by the same proportion, resulting in the same surface brightness. For extended objects such as nebulae or galaxies, this allows the estimation of spatial distance from surface brightness by means of the distance modulus