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.
Well, give or take a few million years. That age can be extended to most of the objects and material in the Solar System. The United States Geological Survey(USGS) website has a lot of indepth material about how the age of the Solar System was determined. The basics of it are that all material radioactively decays into a stable isotope.