Thirteen billion years ago, it was morning in the universe. On Thursday, two independent teams of astronomers reported that they might be zeroing in on the time that bright galaxies began to light up the primordial universe.

The number of galaxies, they say in two papers published in Nature, seems to have increased drastically 700 million to 900 million years after the Big Bang. If true, the results could be a boon to theorists who would like to understand how galaxies formed and what stars they were made of.

The results also lend support to the prevailing notion of galaxy formation, which holds that luminous galaxies were rare in early times and that they grew from the assembly of smaller building blocks.

"This is a very exciting time," said Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was not involved in the work. "Advanced technology allows us for the first time to observe the opening chapter of 'genesis."'

Rychard J. Bouwens and Garth D. Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, combed three years worth of data from the Hubble Space Telescope and found a tenfold increase in the numbers of galaxies over the 200 million years.

"The data demonstrate very clearly that there is quite a dramatic change in galaxy population over 200 million years," Illingworth said. The galaxies the researchers saw, he said, were one-tenth the size of the Milky Way, the solar system's galaxy, but just as bright, because they were ferociously forming new stars. He characterized those galaxies as "the seeds" of galaxies like ours or its neighbor in Andromeda.

Another team, led by Masanori Iye of the National Astronomical Observatory in Tokyo, which has been using the giant Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, found a similar jump in galaxy counts in the same period. That includes what they say is the earliest galaxy yet confirmed, just 750 million years after the Big Bang, or equivalently 12.8 billion light-years from Earth.

Astronomers compute the distances of cosmic objects in space and time by measuring how much their light has been lengthened in wavelength, or "red shifted," by their motion away from Earth because of the expansion of the universe.

Iye and his colleagues used direct spectroscopic measurements of light emitted by hydrogen in the galaxy's starlight to do that.

Illingworth and his colleague used an indirect technique, looking for the absorption of starlight by hydrogen, to derive distances and dates.

The universe was born in light 13.7 billion years ago in the standard Big Bang model. But after it had cooled for protons and electrons to combine into hydrogen atoms, the cosmos went cold and dark.