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Asterisk means that the word has been reverse engineered without any direct evidence backing it up. All proto languages will have asterisks in front of all their words because proto languages are, by definition, languages that were used before anything was written down.
The reverse engineered word is likely to be correct (or at least, as correct as we can be), but in the absence of direct evidence, it's still just guesswork
The numbers you're talking about are because we know that there are different consonants used, but we don't entirely know what sounds those consonants are. So we just write all of the consonants that likely sounded somewhat like the letter h as h1, h2, h3, etc., and repeat for the other uncertain consonants.
So basically h1 definitely sounds different than h2, but as for exactly what they sound like, all we know is that both of them are kinda like h
This is mostly correct so I'll focus on small specific details, OK?
Asterisk means not directly attested. In reconstructions it goes as you say, but you'll also see them before things that you don't expect speakers to use, in synchronic linguistics; for example *me apple eat gets an asterisk because your typical English speaker wouldn't use it.
It is kind of "guesswork" but it follows a very specific procedure, called the comparative method. As in, it is not an "anything goes".
The sounds represented as *h₁, *h₂, *h₃, *h₄ and *H do not necessarily sound like [h]. At this point they're simply part of the notation. For example, a common hypothesis is that *h₁ was [ʔ], it's more like the sound in "oh-oh" than like [h]. And some argue that they aren't even the sounds themselves, but rather the effect of the sounds on descendant words (the difference is important because, if two sounds had the same effect, they ended with the same symbol).
Thanks for the details! I forgot some of the details since I last took a course in linguistics like almost 10 years ago