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.
Oldest Known Planet. Photograph courtesy NASA/Brad Hansen (UCLA)/Harvey Richer (UBC)/Steinn Sigurdsson (Penn State)/Ingrid Stairs (UBC)/Stephen Thorsett (UCSC) Bright-blue Earth looms over the oldest known planet in the Milky Way. The ancient planet is thought to be about 13 billion years old, more than twice as old as Earth and a mere billion years younger than the estimated age of the universe.