What do they look like? Tree swallows are small birds (about 14 cm long) with long wings and small legs and feet. They are irridescent greenish-blue on their head, shoulders and back, and white their chin, breast and belly. Tree swallows have a short black beak and dark brownish feet.
Ernest Rutherford concluded that an atom contains a very small, dense center, called a nucleus, with a positive charge as a result of his gold foil experiment.
The nucleus was postulated as small and dense to account for the scattering of alpha particles from thin gold foil, as observed in a series of experiments performed by undergraduate Ernest Marsden under the direction of Rutherford and German physicist Hans Geiger in 1909.