He concluded from the gold foil experiment that…The fact that most alpha particles went straight through the foil is evidence for the atom being mostly empty space A small number of alpha particles being deflected at large angles suggested that there is a concentration of positive charge in the atom - like charges repel, so the positive alpha particles were being repelled by positive charges the very small number of alpha particles coming straight back suggested that the positive charge and mass are concentrated in a tiny volume in the atom (the nucleus) - the tiny number doing this means the chance of being on that exact collision course was very small, and so the 'target' being aimed at had to be equally tiny Rutherford also concluded that…Most of the atom is empty space – he imagined it like a solar system, the electrons ‘orbit’ the nucleus. – the nucleus itself occupying a small part of the atom. He didn’t include neutrons as they hadn’t been discovered (in 1932 by James Chadwick) This disproved Sir J.J. Thomson’s Plum Pudding model where the atom was believed to be a sphere of positive charge with negatively charged electrons scattered around the atom like plums in a pudding Ernest Rutherford’s model of an atom relates to our understanding of the atomic structure we know today because… Rutherford's gold foil experiment showed that the atom is mostly empty space with a tiny, dense, positively-charged nucleus and that the mass of an atom is mainly from the nucleus- we know that today that the nucleus is of the atom is positive and is made up of protons and neutrons and the mass of a proton is 1836 times bigger than an electron. He discovered the fundamental and the basic structure of an atom, and he proposed the nuclear model of the atom, which we use when discussing about the atomic structure. "Rutherfordium is a synthetic chemical element; it has symbol Rf and atomic number 104. It is named after physicist Ernest Rutherford. As a synthetic element, it is not found in nature and can only be made in a particle accelerator. It is radioactive; the most stable known isotope, 267Rf, has a half-life of about 48 minutes. In the periodic table, it is a d-block element and the second of the fourth-row transition elements. It is in period 7 and is a group 4 element. Chemistry experiments have confirmed that rutherfordium behaves as the heavier homolog to hafnium in group 4. The chemical properties of rutherfordium are characterized only partly. They compare well with the other group 4 elements, even though some calculations had indicated that the element might show significantly different properties due to relativistic effects. In the 1960s, small amounts of rutherfordium were produced at Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in the Soviet Union and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.[11] Priority of discovery and hence the name of the element was disputed between Soviet and American scientists, and it was not until 1997 that the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) established rutherfordium as the official name of the element. It is also the longest named element on the periodeic table." Wikipedia |