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.
Geologic and Biological Timeline of the Earth. Astronomical and geological evidence indicates that the Universe is approximately 13,820 million years old[42], and our solar system is about 4,567 million years old. Earth's Moon formed 4,450 million years ago, just 50 million years after the Earth's formation.