Is the core of the Sun ice cold?

When I was building the concept of the Stareaters, I was worried that they'd burn up trying to swallow a star. I stumbled across an article about a man named Renzo Boscoli who proposed that the inside of the Sun was ice cold. The article described the well-documented Ranque effect which shows that within a vortex (like a tornado), the outer part gets hotter and the inner part gets colder. Boscoli speculated that the Ranque effect would dictate that the inner core of the Sun was actually super-cold slushy hydrogen and the main fusion reaction took place closer to the surface of the Sun. I figured maybe the Stareaters could siphon off the photosphere and then digest the rest of the star more leisurely.

In fact, the original design of the Stareater was a long tube with bulges representing multiple "stomachs" like a cow for digesting the various layers of the star.

Ultimately, I said screw it and made the Stareaters Dyson Spheres. That way, they were so large, it didn't matter. They were really cool "villains" but why would they eat stars in the first place? Next blog entry.