THE universe just got a lot smaller thanks to scientists recalculating its size. Calculations that haven't been updated for 13 years have finally been modernised, making the universe shrink by a staggering 320million light-years in all directions. When scientists talk about the universe, people often interpret that as everything. However, what they actually mean is the observable universe, which is just everything that they can see – beyond that is a mystery. The universe is expanding faster and faster all the time, so you would have thought that the observable universe would have gotten a lot bigger since it was last calculated. In 2003, physicist J. Richard Gott III and colleagues calculated the observable universe based on data from the WMAP satellite which took the Big Bang afterglow into consideration and found that the observable universe was 45.66billion light-years in radius — 91.32bn light-years wide. The afterglow affected calculations as the observable universe is just a