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.
Heavy Metal Planets. Earth was born out of the debris of a protoplanetary disc around a nascent Sun 4.54 billion years ago â a serious chunk of time in anybody's book. Yet the universe is 13.7 billion years old â the Solar System has been around for just the last third of cosmic history.