Okay, Captain Kirk, here's another danger you've got to watch out for while you're wandering around the cosmos. Here's an article from Curiosity about magnetars.
Magnetars are one of the most extreme and mysterious objects in space. They're surprisingly small, they're incredibly dense, and, like their name suggests, they pack one heck of a magnetic pull.
At the final stage of a star's life, it explodes into a supernova. As it collapses in on itself, it outshines all of its neighbors before fading slowly away. If the living star was big enough, it leaves over a neutron star: a star so dense that, although it can often be the diameter of a small city, a teaspoon of its matter weighs at least a billion tons. Meanwhile, they spin fast—really fast. Hundreds of times per second fast. All this density equates to a really powerful magnetic field—about a trillion times more powerful than Earth's. But magnetars? Scientists aren't sure why, but they're an especially magnetic form of neutron star. Their magnetic fields measure at about 1,000 trillion times that of Earth.
Scientists have been on the search for magnetars since 1979, when a shock of gamma rays (later identified as coming from magnetar SGR 0525-66) pulsed through the solar system, resulting in space equipment disruptions and atmospheric abnormalities. In the decades since, fewer than 25 neutron stars out of about 2,000 across the galaxy have been dubbed magnetars, though a handful of other candidates are pending confirmation. From Earth's standpoint, that's a good thing. Just over a decade ago, in 2004, effects from an explosion, or "starquake," of SGR 1806-20, (50,000 light years away), was powerful enough to impact the Earth. It damaged and disabled satellites, and even partially ionized the planet's upper atmosphere.