Close Encounters of the Hexagonal Kind

Reddit's space communities buzz with questions about cosmic oddities, from misidentified star clusters to mysterious signals. This episode dives into two: a repeating radio transient that sparks alien speculation and a persistent hexagonal vortex at Saturn's north pole, blending enthusiast curiosity, expert debunking, and fringe theories.

Periodic Radio Signals and Alien Hype

Space subreddits like r/stargazing often feature novice photos of the Pleiades star cluster, prompting the in-joke "it's always the Pleiades." A recent post on phys.org about a long-period radio transient—emitting stable pulses every 36 minutes—drew similar excitement, with users wondering if it signaled extraterrestrials. Astronomer Yvette Sendis (u/Andromeda321 on Reddit, assistant professor at University of Oregon) topped the comments: "Radio astronomer here. TLDR: still probably not aliens." She explained that periodic radio signals are common in radio astronomy, which studies waves below 100 gigahertz to detect processes invisible in other spectra, like shock waves around black holes. Pulsars—rapidly spinning neutron stars beaming radio pulses—exemplify this, as does her favorite, the "Great Galactic Burper," which burst every 77 minutes for years until 2007. Sendis noted such oddities arise often but stem from natural sources like unusual white dwarfs, not aliens—a pattern since radio astronomy'