“I did all my own flying.”

In an interview with Starlog magazine ahead of the release of Superman: The Movie, you get the sense that Christopher Reeve had truly come to embody Superman. You’ll believe a man can fly, the movie’s tagline proclaimed. But for Reeve, it wasn’t just a claim. It was true, and it had nothing to do with stunts or special effects.

“The flying happens in the eyes,” Reeve said in the interview, published in March of 1968. “The flying comes in the conviction that you know where you are, what the altitude is, what speed you’re going and you know what you’re looking at.” For this reason, Reeve claimed he was “never doubled” by a stand-in.

Reeve’s love for the character is palpable in both this magazine interview and the movie itself, but the actor somewhat infamously fell out of love with Superman in the years that followed. At a certain point, he felt so trapped and typecast by his reputation as the Man of Steel, that he considered not returning for Superman III. For his final appearance as Supe in 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Reeve only accepted the role because he was allowed to help shape the story.

Much has been said in the decades since about Reeve’s portrayal of Superman and how it changed both superheroes and Hollywood forever. Now, a new documentary titled Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story finds a way to tell a new version of a familiar tale. What co-directors Peter Ettedgui and Ian Bonhôte learned in telling the story of Reeve’s life is that it took a near-fatal accident to make the beloved icon fall in love with the idea of Superman again.

Sci-fi tends to paint the edge of our galaxy as a desolate backwater, but in one early galaxy, the galactic rim is the bright, bustling center of activity, and the core is the aging backwater.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently spotted a tiny galaxy in the early universe, more than 12 billion light years away, whose core was full of older, slowly fading stars; all the hot new star formation was happening out on the edges of the galaxy, not in the core, like a cosmic version of suburban sprawl and slowly-dying downtowns. The inside-out growth of this ancient galaxy could teach us something about the history of our own Milky Way and how it compares to the rest of the universe.

Cambridge University astrophysicist Sandro Tacchella and his colleagues published their work in the journal Nature Astronomy.