Okay so I fiddled with those two lines, and a few of the others, and it didn't seem to make any difference. I could multiply them by 2 or by 10, or reduce them to 0 or 1, and the effect still acted the same way -- it would be present in the beginning and gradually go away. Took the same amount of time to reach certain states, too (based on a replay).
I also loaded up the autosave from the end of a 6 hour game, where the effect had ceased, killed the last enemy planet and then scrapped everything I owned and evacuated every planet, so all that was left visible were the neutral extractors. No change.
I watched a replay at 8x speed for the first 30 minutes of it and can describe what happens a lil better--
At the start it is normal, the texture looks all high quality, and the pulsating effect looks convincing and normal.
As the game progress it seems like the different parts of the texture sort of wash together and the effect noticably slows down, to where it is barely noticable on 1x speed.
At the end of a 6 hour game the star's texture looks noticeably pixelated and the effect is gone, save for the occasional twinkling appearance of some of the pixels on its surface.
Here's a comparison of the same star, at the start and ~4 hours into the game -- you can see how the texture is clearer in the first:
http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/natural/86b5b5757101f6d1e6a6badb0fc1ac8905b4bd05.png
http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/natural/94a231c4e79c84b91f5596b8a2ea14381103acfc.png
And here it is from another angle and closer, showing the odd pixelation up close:
http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/natural/b5a6cea3f79eb7255185c59f77b36a5d07ccd9b0.png
Am I the only one with this? Can anyone take a look at their autosaves or run a replay in high speed to see if the effect changes for you?