I recall reading (but cannot find at the moment) a different study looking at sunlike stars with known exoplanets that did not involve the kepler data. It found that there was a preponderance of super-flare prone stars amongst sunlike stars with hot-jupiter-style large close in exoplanets, adding fuel to the idea that magnetic interactions cause a subset of them. Might not account for all of course even though the Kepler data would only actually see a tiny fraction of the hot jupiters that exist in its field of view.
Stars as gravitational sinks that allow strong energy release just from objects falling onto them is an interesting concept. I presume that what makes such an event extremely rare is the very small amount of angular momentum you need to actually hit one and the fact that light pressure and sublimation will tend to destroy or deflect most objects long before they come close to anything like an impact?
Sun has large size ans small comets hit it every year. But I would like to know how often it is hit by 100 km size body. My uncalibrated idea is one in 1 million years. I will try to ask on Bad astromomy forum or serch for more extimates and will post resul here.
Bolonkin & Friedlander (2013) argues that it might be possible for "a dying dictator" to blow up the Sun, and thus destroy all life on Earth:
Warning: the paper is published in an obscure journal by publisher #206 on Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2013, and I was unable to find confirmation of the authors' claimed credentials from any reputable sources with 5 minutes of Googling. It also has two spelling errors in the abstract. (It has no citations on Google scholar, but I wouldn't expect it to have any since it was only released in July 2013.)
I haven't read the paper, and I'd love to see someone fluent in astrophysics comment on its contents.
My guess is that this is not a risk at all or, as with proposed high-energy physics disasters, the risk is extremely low-probability but physically conceivable (though perhaps not by methods imagined by Bolonkin & Friedlander).