Drawbacks of Rutherford's Atomic Model

Rutherford's nuclear model pictured the atom rather like a miniature solar system, with the massive, positively-charged nucleus playing the role of the sun and the much lighter electrons orbiting it like planets. This picture runs into two serious problems. First, the electrons in this model cannot simply sit still: the electrostatic attraction of the nucleus would pull a stationary electron straight in, collapsing the atom into something like Thomson's older 'plum pudding' picture. So Rutherford's electrons had to be imagined as moving in orbits — but an electron travelling in a circular orbit is constantly changing direction, which means it is constantly accelerating, and Maxwell's electromagnetic theory says an accelerating charged particle must continuously radiate electromagnetic energy. An orbiting electron losing energy this way would have to spiral steadily inward, its orbit shrinking, until it crashed into the nucleus in a tiny fraction of a second. Real atoms are plainly stable and do not do this, so Rutherford's model predicts an intrinsic instability that never actually happens — a first, fatal flaw. Second, and independently of the stability problem, Rutherford's model simply says nothing about HOW the electrons are distributed around the nucleus or what dete …