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The atomic nucleus is the small, dense region consisting of protons and neutrons at the center of an atom, discovered in 1911 by Ernest Rutherford based on the 1909 Geiger–Marsden gold foil experiment.
Hydrogen was known to be the lightest element, and its nuclei presumably the lightest nuclei. Now, because of all these considerations, Rutherford decided that a hydrogen nucleus was possibly a fundamental building block of all nuclei, and also possibly a new fundamental particle as well, since nothing was known to be lighter than that nucleus.
Antonius Johannes van den Broek (4 May 1870 – 25 October 1926) was a Dutch mathematical economist and amateur physicist, notable for being the first who realized that the position of an element in the periodic table (now called atomic number) corresponds to the charge of its atomic nucleus.
Much of an atom's positive charge is concentrated in a relatively tiny volume at the center of the atom, known today as the nucleus. The magnitude of this charge is proportional to (up to a charge number that can be approximately half of) the atom's atomic mass—the remaining mass is now known to be mostly attributed to neutrons.
A schematic of the nucleus of an atom indicating β − radiation, the emission of a fast electron from the nucleus (the accompanying antineutrino is omitted). In the Rutherford model for the nucleus, a red sphere was a proton with positive charge, and a blue sphere was a proton tightly bound to an electron, with no net charge.
So, element 105 was named dubnium, and element 106 was named seaborgium. The elements were placed in the periodic table’s seventh row, which is above the row of lanthanides and the row of actinides.
The number of protons in an atom (which Rutherford called the "atomic number" [27] [28]) was found to be equal to the element's ordinal number on the periodic table and therefore provided a simple and clear-cut way of distinguishing the elements from each other. The atomic weight of each element is higher than its proton number, so Rutherford ...
They determined that the relatively tiny neutron split the nucleus of the massive uranium atoms into two roughly equal pieces, contradicting Fermi. [5] This was an extremely surprising result; all other forms of nuclear decay involved only small changes to the mass of the nucleus, whereas this process—dubbed "fission" as a reference to ...