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.
Asked by: Gina Hall, Bristol. We tend to think of the Sun as the stationary heart of our Solar System, with the planets orbiting serenely around it. In reality, the Sun is dragging us around the galaxy at around 800,000km/h, taking around 250 million years to complete a single orbit. That means our Solar System has made around 18 complete circuits since it was formed around 4.5 billion years ago.