What are these stars?

Those sentences which are colored in orange are Maharishi Dayananda Saraswati book Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth) and those which are colored in black are Jerry Thomas’s response.

"And there appeared a great wonder in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet , and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to deliver. And there appeared another wonder in heave; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth." (12:1 – 4.)

C. Oh! What big yarns (St. John has spun)! The poor woman cries even in the Christian heaven but no one takes pity on he or does anything to relieve her pain. What a long tail that dragon must have had that cast one-third of the stars of the heaven on the earth? Not this earth is very small compared with the stars that are very big spheres. Our earth could not support even one of them. We can, therefore, rightly infer that one-third of the stars of the heaven must have fallen on the house of the writer of this book and that dragon also, that had such a long tail that it drew one-third of the stars of the heaven and did cast them to the earth, must have lived in the house of the same.

Answer: For the interpretation of the symbolic language in the prophetical books, please read the article Introduction to the Revelation and Figurative Language of Prophetical Writings.

Maharishi missed on the prophetical language in most of the questions in revelation due to which I have to repeat and remind the same thing in almost all answers in Revelation.

The sun, moon and the stars have been used in the Holy Bible to describe Israel.

Genesis 37: 9-10 “Then he dreamed still another dream and told it to his brothers, and said, "Look, I have dreamed another dream. And this time, the sun, the moon, and the eleven stars bowed down to me."  So he told [it] to his father and his brothers; and his father rebuked him and said to him, "What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall your mother and I and your brothers indeed come to bow down to the earth before you?" 

The coming persecution of Israel at the hand of Anti Christ fits with this view.