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Hubble Chronicles Mysterious Outburst
An eruptive star that brightened to 600,000 times its initial intensity and briefly outshone all others in the Milky Way Galaxy has astronomers amazed and puzzled over what happened...The star, named V838 Monocerotis, has suddenly grown so big that if placed in the center of our solar system it would engulf Jupiter.
Hubble took a series of 4 photos, and you all have been looking only at the last of them. Also is a link in case you want large versions of each individual photo, and another for links for all the text, images, and video concerning the event. I'm surprised Doctor Fishboy never pointed this out.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
It was meant as a joke. But maybe you can make a weapon with which you can expode a sun. Shouldn't be too hard considering the sun is one giant atomic bomb anyway...
If it's easy, it should happen all over the place already through natural processes. This does not seem to be the case (novae and supernovae are quite rare in the grand scheme of things).
Stars are very good at being self-balancing systems. As reaction rate increases, so does photon pressure, which makes the star less dense, which reduces reaction rate. This breaks down only in special cases.
Unstable giant stars, like this star appears to be, are one of those cases. Our sun may end up doing something not very different from this in a few billion years as its core runs out of fuel.
Violent explosions only occur when something overrides fusion-produced photon pressure and the star starts collapsing. This mainly happens when a star runs out of fuel, and stops again when either a new fusion stage starts, or when degeneracy pressure takes over.