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.
Even more constraining were Kelvin's estimates of the age of the Sun, which were based on estimates of its thermal output and a theory that the Sun obtains its energy from gravitational collapse; Kelvin estimated that the Sun is about 20 million years old.