What difference does * make here ? (ls command question)

Solaris 10 (korn shell)

I use -d option with ls command , when I want to suppress contents of the subdirectories being listed
when listing all the directories and files in a directory.

This is what man page says about -d option in ls command.

 -d           If an argument is a directory, lists  only  its name  (not its contents). 
               Often used with -l to get the status of a directory.

# Creating 2 files and 2 directories for testing

$ pwd
/tmp/stage_dir
$ ls
$ touch a.txt
$ touch b.txt
$ mkdir mysub_dir1
$ mkdir mysub_dir2
$
$ ls
a.txt       b.txt       mysub_dir1  mysub_dir2

A plain ls -d command will only list just a dot (.) which is understandable because current directory (dot) is just another file and -d option will suppress anything within it from being listed. My question is how the files and directories are listed when an asterik (*) is added . ie. ls -d *

$ ls -d
.

$ ls -dl
drwxrwxr-x   5 oracle   oinstall     512 Aug  4 23:41 .


$ ls -d *
a.txt       b.txt       mysub_dir1  mysub_dir2
$
$
$
$ ls -ld *
-rw-r--r--   1 oracle   oinstall       0 Aug 26 12:01 a.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 oracle   oinstall       0 Aug 26 12:01 b.txt
drwxr-xr-x   2 oracle   oinstall     512 Aug 26 12:01 mysub_dir1
drwxr-xr-x   2 oracle   oinstall     512 Aug 26 12:01 mysub_dir2

And so the difference would have been clear if you did an ls -ld * versus ls -l *

Have you tried:

ls -lad *

Or if that doesn't work on you O/S as a non-root user (I can't test it from here):

 ls -lad .??* *

The difference becomes clear when you do echo *

The shell substitutes before ls -d is run, turning * into a list of names.