Lips faster than the speed of light?

In Rome's Revolution, the first inkling that the stars were being consumed was when the team at Skyler Base sent a space tug out to chase down the light waves from Winfall's disappearance. Originally, the time it took for the Stareater to swallow a star was clocked at 13 minutes. But is it really possible that it happens that fast? Does that require that the Stareater's "lips" travel faster than the speed of light?

Let's use the Sun as an example. The Sun is 864,327 miles in diameter. The Stareater has to be many, many times larger to swallow a star whole. In fact, OMCOM actually measured the diameter and came up with 1.5 light minutes across. This equates to a diameter of 16,765,415 miles.

The Stareater was been designed to have "lips" which articulate and open then close around a star. It has to open up wide enough for the star to slide in. Figure 1/4 of its own diameter or 5 million miles. The circumference of a circle is Pi times the diameter so that makes the opening nearly 16 million miles wide.

For the action to be completed in 13 minutes, the "lips" would have to be closing at rate of about 48 million miles per hour. That's pretty fast!

The speed of light is 670 million miles per hour so the lips close not even one tenth the speed of light. In reality, each lip only has to travel half the distance so it is about 1/20th the speed of light. Still fast! And the dimming of the star only takes place once the lips occlude the disk of the star.

Let's go back to the diameter of the Sun: 864,327 miles. To match up with the Vuduri measurements, each lip would have to travel 1.3 million miles in 13 minutes or about 5 million miles per hour which isn't even one hundredth the speed of light.

So, in conclusion, no, the Stareater doesn't have to swallow a star with lips that travel at the speed of light. In fact, their speed is downright leisurely!