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 Sun is about 4.57 billion years old, so is the solar system. The age of the Solar System is determined through the radiometric dating of heavy elements such as uranium. Measurement of radioactive decay rates allow us to determine when the elements in the Solar System were formed.