What does the brown asterisk icon on a file mean in Eclipse?

This page should give you a good rundown of what the icons mean for GIT in eclipse

A quoted summary:

dirty (folder) - At least one file below the folder is dirty; that means that it has changes in the working tree that are neither in the index nor in the repository.

tracked - The resource is known to the Git repository.

untracked - The resource is not known to the Git repository.

ignored - The resource is ignored by the Git team provider. Here only the preference settings under Team -> Ignored Resources and the "derived" flag are relevant. The .gitignore file is not taken into account.

dirty - The resource has changes in the working tree that are neither in the index nor in the repository.

staged - The resource has changes which are added to the index. Not that adding to the index is possible at the moment only on the commit dialog on the context menu of a resource.

partially-staged - The resource has changes which are added to the index and additionally changes in the working tree that are neither in the index nor in the repository.

added - The resource is not yet tracked by but added to the Git repository.

removed - The resource is staged for removal from the Git repository.

conflict - A merge conflict exists for the file.

assume-valid - The resource has the "assume unchanged" flag. This means that Git stops checking the working tree files for possible modifications, so you need to manually unset the bit to tell Git when you change the working tree file. This setting can be switched on with the menu action Team->Assume unchanged (or on the command line with git update-index --assume-unchanged).

Eclipse icons list:

1- JDT icons

2- main icons

3- Eclipse user interface guideline

4- GIT Label Decorations

I'm not familiar with git, but when using svn with Eclipse, the white star on the brown square means you have made changes to the file since the last time you updated it. The gold cylinder, on the other hand, means you have not made changes so the local file is identical to the repository version. So it must mean something that is roughly equivalent to that in git.