Balloon-spoked asterisk

It comes from the heritage of printer ornaments and typographic dingbats.

Print shops historically used ornaments cut in wood or cast in metal to embellish chapter heads, divide passages, and fill blank spaces. The term dingbat dates back at least to the early nineteenth century. When digital typography standardized these symbols, characters like ❉ entered Unicode primarily through Hermann Zapf's iconic typeface, ITC Zapf Dingbats, created in the late 1970s.