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.
Our sun is 25,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way. The oldest star in the galaxy is 13.2 billion years old. The stellar disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter and is about 1,000 light years thick. It is estimated to contain up to 400 billion stars.