Sep 11, 2014 12:53 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

The Earth could be in for some geomagnetic disturbances Friday and Saturday after the sun emitted two solar flares toward our planet on Wednesday.

Also known as Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), solar flares can disrupt the Earth's power grid and communications though satellite interference. Officials with NASA told Space.com that humans are not in any danger, nor are the crewmembers aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

To learn more about the potential dangers of CMEs, visit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's Space Weather Prediction Center website.

"Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground.  However - when intense enough - they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel," NASA said in a statement. "This flare is classified as an X1.6 class flare. 'X-class' denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc."

Such solar flares are not a rarity by any means, the Washington Post reported, but they pose a threat to the Earth when they come from a sunspot that happens to be facing in its direction. The Earth is on a geomagnetic storm watch for Friday and Saturday, with the second expected to be slightly more intense.

Thanks to a unique placement of the CMEs' source, they are expected to graze the Earth's northern tip, meaning we will not get the flares' full force.

"What's unusual about this event is that the sunspot group producing the flares is right in the middle of the sun," Tom Berger, director of the Space Weather Prediction Center, told the Washington Post. "This is the first time in a while that we've had an active sunspot group pointed almost directly at Earth produce two successive major events."

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