Save guides, add subjects and pick up where you left off with your BBC account. An element's atomic number defines it. An element with 17 protons will always be chlorine. However an element's mass ...

The nucleus is very small compared to the atom as a whole: as electrons are even smaller, most of an atom is empty space the diameter of a nucleus can be 100,000 times less than the diameter of an ...

Everyone at that time imagined the atom as a "plum pudding ... emitted by the radioactive element radium) at a sheet of gold foil only 1/3000 of an inch thick, and tracing the particles' paths.