Are you sure the asterisk shape is geographically determined? It's not something I've looked into before, but to me they feel ubiquitous.
What I think is relevant is probably that the star shape with the circle inside can also be read as a flower, and was probably chosen as an intentionally ambiguous form. Just like the nymphs walking around the zodiac signs can be seen as holding stars on strings, but also flowers on stalks. If one of these figures were seen in isolation, someone who didn't know about the zodiac context might just see a nude figure holding a flower.
The asterisks marking the beginning of the paragraphs in the VM folios 102 to 116 might be used to mark important ideas. In the multilingual 16th century dictionary I found the explanation, that 'a little star is a symbol in the text'. Since the dictionary, written by the German Protestant Hieronymus Megiser, was written 100 years after the VM, it is reasonable to assume that this was a common practice in Germany, or that somebody had seen these pages in the VM and was wondering what they meant.
The asterisk was already used on the artifacts from the 5th millennia BC on the Balkans, however in classical Greek the asterisk was used as a typographical symbol. Aristarchus of Samothrace used it when proofreading Homeric poetry to mark the duplicated lines. Origen also used this symbol to mark the missing Hebrew lines. In the Middle Ages, the asterisk was used for particularly important text, to link it with the comments in the margin.
From this we can assume that the author of the VM was familiar with the classical works of Homer and Origen, as well as with the scholarly works of the Middle Ages.
The stars are one of the dominant images in the VM and can be found in all sections, except the Pharmaceutical.
Even if the circular pictures contain the images of the Moon and the Sun, and a colourful 12-point star, that does not necessarily mean the labels are the names of the sun. Nor does it mean that the circular pictures filled with stars and a labels next to them (f68) are the names of the stars. The stars in the circular picture have different number of points, and many points are two-coloured, as if to allude to existential and spiritual.
The big circular pictures of the stars look like Armenian 'wheel of eternity'. The author sees in them the passing of time, as well as the marvelous images the pattern of stars makes in nightly sky. In Greek myths, the important people and gods were placed in the sky and gave the names to the stars and constellations.
According to ancient Illyrian belief the souls of all people go to the heavens and become stars. So, in a way, the concept of heavens represented all the wisdom of the infinite number of dead people who still have influence on the living people on earth (I suppose the modern term would be 'individual' and 'collective' consciousness passed down to humanity over the ages.
In the VM, the spiritual reality is marked with the pattern of tiny stars.
In a similar way the stars were the first writing (in the sky) to give people orientation in time and place, the writing was used. This interpretation can be made from the circular pictures with a plain star in the middle, followed by the star with individual letters between the point, and another one with individual words.
The stars in the hands of the nymphs can also be interpreted in a spiritual sence. There are also two animals holding a star on the string - the fishes and the lizard. The first Christian regarded the fish as a symbol of Christ. And what about the Salamander (November Zodiac sign in the VM)? A Salamander was a sacred animal of the medieval Slavic religious sect Bogomils who gave rise to Patarens in Northern Italy, and Cathars in France. The fire salamander with its black and yellow was a fitting symbol for duality. It became a medieval symbol for prophets.
The obsession of the author of the VM with the stars, might also be related to the symbolic use of stars by the medieval dynasties, such as Counts of Celje, as well as by the Waldensians and Carthusians.
The author of the VM was not a great artist, but he surely was a great thinker to be able to pack his pictures with so many different layers and combine them with a common thread.
My intent was to indicate that French illustrations provide good examples of asterisk stars, not to propose French exclusivity of use.
In the cosmic investigation, both BNF Fr. 565 and Harley 334 use asterisk stars, while the stars of the VMs cosmos are polygonal. This is one of the examples where objects in the VMs cosmos are represented by visually differing, yet equivalent objects to those found in the historical illustrations. Likewise, the Earth in BNF and Harley is a pictorial representation, while the VMs version is linguistic. The objects represented are ostensibly equivalent, but the two representations versus the VMs are completely different visually.
For what it's worth, here are some examples of asterisk stars from this website devoted to medieval arms and armor.
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Most of the sources for asterisk stars are after c. 1400. Earlier artists treated backgrounds in several different ways, but the use of stars wasn't one of them. Then in the first quarter (1400-1425) there is a proliferation of manuscripts from Paris.
Paris was the provenance source for the cosmic illustrations in BNF Fr. 565 and Harley 334, both of which have asterisk stars.