This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as starburst.
The glyph is not a composition. It has no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. The word that U+273A forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
The asterisk ( *), from Late Latin asteriscus, from Ancient Greek ἀστερίσκος, asteriskos, "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star.
Computer scientists and mathematicians often vocalize it as star (as, for example, in the A* search algorithm or C*-algebra). An asterisk is usually five- or six-pointed in print and six- or eight-pointed when handwritten, though more complex forms exist. Its most common use is to call out a footnote. It is also often used to censor offensive words.
In computer science, the asterisk is commonly used as a wildcard character, or to denote pointers, repetition, or multiplication.
Representations
System
Representation (click value to copy)
Nº
10042
UTF-8
E2 9C BA
UTF-16
27 3A
UTF-32
00 00 27 3A
URL-Quoted
%E2%9C%BA
HTML hex reference
✺
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake
✺
alias
starburst
Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes)
81 37 C1 36
LATEX
\ding{90}
RFC 5137
\u'273A'
Bash and Zsh inside echo -e
\u273A
C and C++
\u273A
C#
\u273A
CSS
\00273A
Excel
=UNICHAR(10042)
Go
\u273A
JavaScript
\u273A
Modern JavaScript since ES6
\u{273a}
JSON
\u273A
Java
\u273A
Lua
\u{273A}
Matlab
char(10042)
Perl
"\x{273A}"
PHP
\u{273a}
PostgreSQL
U&'\273A'
PowerShell
`u{273A}
Python
\u273A
Ruby
\u{273a}
Rust
\u{273a}
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