means The luminous balls of hot plasma scattered across the night sky, each one a sun burning by nuclear fusion, often used loosely for anything dazzling or famous.

from From Old English 'steorra,' part of a vast family that runs through Germanic 'sternô' all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European root '*h₂stḗr.' That same ancient root scattered its light across many tongues — a likely cousin of Latin 'stella' and Greek 'astēr' (which gave us 'astronomy' and 'asterisk'), and possibly tied to a verb meaning 'to strew' or 'spread out,' as if the stars were grains flung across the dark.