Accelerated formation of ultra-massive galaxies in the first billion years

Recent James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations have revealed an unexpected abundance of massive-galaxy candidates in the early Universe, extending further in redshift and to lower luminosity than what had previously been found by submillimetre surveys^1-6. These JWST candidates have been interpreted as challenging the Λ cold dark-matter cosmology (where Λ is the cosmological constant)^7-9, but, so far, these studies have mostly relied on only rest-frame ultraviolet data and have lacked spectroscopic confirmation of their redshifts^10-16. Here we report a systematic study of 36 massive dust-obscured galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts between 5 and 9 from the JWST FRESCO survey. We find no tension with the Λ cold dark-matter model in our sample. However, three ultra-massive galaxies (logM_★/M_⊙ ≳ 11.0, where M_★ is the stellar mass and M_⊙ is the mass of the Sun) require an exceptional fraction of 50 per cent of baryons converted into stars-two to three times higher than the most efficient galaxies at later epochs. The contribution from an active galactic nucleus is unlikely because of their extended emission. Ultra-massive galaxies account for as much as 17 per cent of the total cosmic star-formation-rate density¹⁷ at redshifts between about five and six.