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In 1911, a British scientist called Ernest Rutherford directed a series of experiments that greatly increased our understanding of atomic structure. During the experiment, his students fired positively charged alpha particles (helium nuclei, each of which contains two protons and two neutrons) at an extremely thin sheet of gold. (Gold is a very malleable metal that can be beaten into a foil that’s only a few atoms thick.) Rutherford expected all the alpha particles to go through the gold foil with minimal deflection, but to his surprise, a few alpha particles bounced straight back. Rutherford concluded that atoms consisted mostly of empty space with a dense nucleus at the center and electrons orbiting the nucleus.
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