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 contains over 200 billion stars, and enough dust and gas to make billions more. The solar system lies about 30,000 light-years from the galactic center, and about 20 light-years above the plane of the galaxy. More than half the stars found in the Milky Way are older than the 4.5 billion year old sun.