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 Milky Way is the galaxy in which the solar system (and our Earth) is located. It is around 13 billion years old, which is just a little less than the age of the Universe. The Milky Way is one of billions of galaxies that astronomers are able to observe. We didn't always know this.