How was the nucleus of an atom discovered?

English physicist Ernest Rutherford is credited with discovering the nucleus in the early 1900s. Rutherford had a long career in atomic physics, during which he taught many other famous physicists. He studied radioactivity along with Marie and Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, and through their experiments, they learned much of what we know today about the atom, including the discovery of the nucleus. Before the nucleus was discovered, it was widely believed that positive and negative charges were distributed evenly throughout the atom. Rutherford, along with Hans Geiger and student Ernest Marsden, conducted some interesting tests that proved otherwise [source: Cambridge].