In 1909, ernest rutherford performed an experiment to explore the atomic structure. in his experiment, he projected high-speed positively charged α‎ particles onto a thin gold foil. he found that all α‎ particles did not follow the same path. many particles passed through the foil without any scattering, implying that most of the space in an atom is empty. some particles were scattered at a large angle, and very few of them scattered back in the direction from which they had come. based on these observations, rutherford proposed an atomic model, which is known as rutherford’s atomic model