As part of an experiment with x-rays in 1909, Rutherford was shooting a beam of alpha particles (or alpha rays, emitted by the radioactive element radium) at a sheet of gold foil only 1/3000 of an ...

Scientists based in Manchester, not the US, made the "key breakthrough" in splitting the atom, despite Donald Trump's claims ...

When U.S. President Donald Trump claimed during his inaugural address that Americans “split the atom,” a ripple of irritation ...

The vacuum is important because any deflection of the alpha particles would only be because of collisions with the gold foil and ... came straight back off the foil Rutherford had discovered ...

The experiment involved bombarding a thin sheet of gold foil with alpha particles, and earned Rutherford, from Bridgewater on New Zealand's South Island, the moniker the "father of nuclear physics".