The atomic nucleus
Núcleo atómico
- Date
- 1911 · confidence high
- Place
- University of Manchester, England, United Kingdom
- Credited to
- Ernest Rutherford; Hans Geiger; Ernest Marsden
- People
- 👤 Ernest Marsden1889–1970👤 Ernest Rutherford1871–1937👤 Hans Geiger1882–1945
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Some alpha particles fired at a gold foil bounce backwards, which can only be explained if positive charge and almost all the mass are concentrated in a tiny nucleus. The atom is almost entirely empty space.
The Geiger and Marsden experiment dates from 1909; the nuclear model was published in 1911. Nagaoka had proposed a Saturnian model in 1904.
What it led to
- Bohr model
- Nuclear physics
- Proton and neutron
- Accelerators and scattering experiments (Rutherford's method)
Built on
- Alpha, beta and gamma rays; radioactive decay law1899-1903
- Nagaoka's Saturnian atomic model1904
- Thomson's plum-pudding model
- Geiger counter (1908)
Made possible
- The proton and the first artificial nuclear transmutation1917-1919
- Geiger counter1908-1928
- Backscattering spectrometry
- Particle accelerators