Substitute the Killing-flow four-acceleration and stationary pressure into the relativistic Euler equation. It gives
For the equation of state of blackbody radiation, , this becomes . The barotropic hydrostatic first integral therefore gives, on each connected nonvacuum fluid region,
This is the stationary radiation density law. Combining it with the Stefan–Boltzmann law also gives the Tolman–Ehrenfest relation .
At a regular finite free surface, a smooth Killing vector field has finite norm. Hence cannot approach zero there. More globally, its norm has a finite upper bound on a compact regular fluid closure, which bounds the density away from zero whenever . If the timelike norm instead tends to zero, the density diverges. Thus a radiation fluid has no regular free surface: a finite radiation-filled cavity needs a material wall supporting nonzero pressure, rather than an unsupported radiation-vacuum interface.
The equation of state of isotropic blackbody radiation is . The barotropic hydrostatic first integral gives . The Stefan–Boltzmann law then yields the Tolman–Ehrenfest relation . Here for the stationary timelike Killing vector field; its normalization only changes the constants.