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.
Calcium-aluminium-rich inclusionsâthe oldest known solid constituents within meteorites that are formed within the Solar Systemâare 4.567 billion years old, giving an age for the solar system and an upper limit for the age of Earth.