The results of the experiments were unexpected. Most of the alpha particles went smoothly through the foil. Only an occasional alpha veered sharply from its original path, sometimes bouncing straight back from the foil! Rutherford reasoned that they must be getting scattered by tiny bits of positively charged matter. Most of the space around these positive centers must be empty. He thought that the electrons must be somewhere within this empty space. Rutherford thought that the negative electrons orbited a positive center in a manner like the solar system where the planets orbit the sun.
