You're looking at JPEG artifacts. The JPEG compression scheme divides an image up into 8x8 pixel blocks and rebuilds each block using a collection of 2D waves as building blocks:

You can faithfully recreate any image by adding together a combination of wave images with the correct brightnesses. However JPEG is a lossy compression algorithm and so it throws away some waves to reduce size. Thus JPEG artifacts often resemble the more primitive waves as the higher order more complicated waves have been dropped. This can appear give structure to what might just be random noise in the original image.

Here is an extremely highly compressed image:

Most 8x8 blocks feature only the most primitive wave, the one in the top left corner of the first image. However in the background and around the "JPG" text you can see a few of the more detailed waves being used.

Your "barbers pole" is probably nothing more than a collection of dim stars in the background that has taken on a more structured, detailed looking appearance due to certain wave shapes being used that make it appear stripy with a ball on the top!

Either that, or it's aliens who can camouflage their ships to look exactly like JPEG artifacts in order to escape detection...