It could be my imagination, but I thought they mentioned that the ability to destroy stars was going to be in an expansion. I think it was in one of the early streams.
I'd need to re-watch the dev streams, but I think I recall something like that. In all likelihood, they were referring to the Terror Star, because I doubt, that the devs will add another mechanic to destroy star systems.
I also suspected this would be the case since this ability to destroy star systems has been around since Gal Civ 1 and Gal Civ 2.
The means to do that in both games was the Terror Star. However, it's been made pretty clear in the databanks, that the plans to create TS have been destroyed by the Thalan. This makes it unlikely that we'll see the TS in the base game. When I asked about it, Frogboy reinforced my suspicion (though it's still possible, that I misunderstood what he meant).