It has been a scorcher of a week.

When it is this hot, go ahead and complain. Play the blame game, too. Global warming, perhaps, or maybe just fault the giant yellow ball in the sky. The sun would be the appropriate scapegoat.

The sun is easiest to blame when you consider that it is the original source of the vast majority of all the light, heat and energy for our planet (the heat we obtain from underground is negligible by comparison).

But, don’t be too hard on the sun; it is, after all the center of our universe — figuratively, if not literally. It is our nearest and dearest star, though at 92,955,000 miles from the earth, it is not exactly within easy reach.

Life on our planet would not be possible without it. Eight planets and their moons, along with poor demoted Pluto and two other dwarf planets, tens of thousands of asteroids, and trillions of comets revolve around the sun. If you like being at the center of attention, in our solar system the sun is the place to be.

It would be tough to get close, though. If you could take the temperature of the core of the sun, your thermometer would read 27,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit! The surface, or photosphere, of this star is much less intense, and comes in at a relatively cool 10,000 degrees F in comparison.

The sun is one big, incandescent ball of gas. Big is the operative word, since this one star contains 98.8 per cent of the entire mass of the solar system. Though it’s made of only gas, mostly hydrogen and some helium, the mass of the sun is 1.8 octillion tons, which is 330,000 times as great as the earth’s mass. It is also larger. It would take 109 earths to fit across the sun and more than 1.3 million earths can be held in its interior.

Our favored star also bathes us in light, as anyone who visited the beach this week can testify. The light from the sun travels quickly, moving at 186,282 miles per second. At that speed, it takes about eight minutes and twenty seconds to reach the earth. Light is the fastest known thing in the universe, and its speed is the basis of all our calculations about speeds and distances throughout the universe.

The sun, as vital as it is to life on our planet, is only a flash in the pan in the grand scheme of things. The sun is about 4.6 billion years old and is considered middle-aged, since it only has about 5 billion more years of fuel left. It will not crash and burn, though. After its useful life, it will become a red giant star, then a white dwarf, and will eventually fade away into a dark lump of matter — about the size of the earth, but still 330,000 times heavier. If it was slightly more massive than it is, it might have ended up in a more spectacular fashion by collapsing and creating a black hole, but it’s not massive enough to do that, so a quieter end is in store for it.

We are lucky that the sun won’t disappear any time soon — we need that big ball of gas in the sky. Though with temperatures as high as they have been, it is hard not to place blame and wish, unlike what Annie the orphan hoped for, that the sun won’t come out tomorrow.

Suzan Bellincampi is director of the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary in Edgartown.