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 ...

Radium decays to radon, throwing out an alpha particle from its nucleus. Unexpectedly, Rutherford's assistants Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden found that a very few of the alpha particles bounced back ...

Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel Prize winner known as the father of nuclear physics, is regarded by many as the first to knowingly split the atom by artificially inducing a nuclear reaction in 1917 ...

Ernest Rutherford (right) and Hans Geiger led the experiments in Manchester Scientists based in Manchester, not the US, made the "key breakthrough" in splitting the atom, despite Donald Trump's ...