What did rutherford discover about the atom?

Rutherford, Ernest definition. A British physicist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rutherford discovered the existence of atomic nuclei. He proposed the current picture of the atom, in which most of the mass of the atom is in the nucleus, with electrons revolving around the nucleus. read more

Ernest Rutherford's famed Gold Foil Experiment of 1909 demonstrated that atoms were made up of a charged nucleus orbited by electrons. He published his findings in 1911 with a description of what he called the Rutherford model of the atom. read more

Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and his wife Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England. James had emigrated to New Zealand from Perth, Scotland, "to raise a little flax and a lot of children". read more

Rutherford presented his own physical model for subatomic structure, as an interpretation for the unexpected experimental results. In it, the atom is made up of a central charge (this is the modern atomic nucleus, though Rutherford did not use the term "nucleus" in his paper) surrounded by a cloud of (presumably) orbiting electrons. read more