To provide defense against these sporadic attacks, the early settlers erected a series of forts in the area. Wood's Fort guarded the Forks-of-the-River just downstream from Newport, and McCoy's Fort and Whitson's Fort defended the area to the south.
The Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun, with most of the remaining mass contained in Jupiter.
The Solar System is one of billions of planetary systems, located within the Milky Way galaxy, of the known universe. The Solar System is estimated to be 4.6 billion years old and contains the Sun, eight planets, five dwarf planets, 169 moons and thousands of asteroids and comets.