How bright was the Big Bang?

Abstract

It is generally believed that in the epoch prior to the formation of the first stars, the Universe was completely dark (the period is therefore known as the Dark Ages). Usually, the start of this epoch is placed at the photon decoupling. In this work, we investigate the question, whether there was enough light during the dark epoch for a human eye to see. We use the black body spectrum of the Universe to find the flux of photon energy for different temperatures and compare them with visual limits of brightness and darkness. We find that the Dark Ages actually began approximately 6 million years later than commonly stated.