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.
This is very fast. Each time the solar system makes one round around the centre of the galaxy it is called a cosmic year. One cosmic year lasts for about 225 million earth years, and the solar system would travel for about 30,000 lightyears. The Sun is about 20 cosmic years old.