Two named entities, and the one everybody guesses is the other star

Before there was a star emoji, there was this: a solid black five-pointed star that has lived in fonts for decades as a typographic ornament. It comes as a matched pair with its hollow twin, the white star, and that pairing is the key to its most familiar job — rating scales, where a row of filled stars against empty ones shows three-out-of-five at a glance without a single number.

Because it's a text character rather than an emoji, it inherits the colour of whatever text surrounds it. Set your paragraph in grey and the star turns grey; that predictability is precisely why designers reach for it in interfaces and print, where the gaudy gold of the emoji star would be a distraction. It scales cleanly, aligns to the baseline, and never surprises you with a platform redesign.

It's worth not confusing it with the emoji star, which is a separate character with its own codepoint and always renders in full colour. Rule of thumb: if you want a star that obeys your typography, use this one; if you want a star that pops in a chat message, use the emoji. They look like cousins, but they answer to different masters.