What did Rutherford’s gold foil experiment of 1909 achieve?

When Rutherford shot gold particles through a very thin sheet of gold foil (only a few atoms thick), he found that most of the particles he fired ped clean through the foil, but a very few were deflected backwards at very sharp angles. This meant that most of the atom was empty space, and instead of having its m spread out through its entire volume, most of the m was concentrated in the center, at the nucleus. The particles that were deflected and bounced backwards at the particle gun did so because they were bouncing off those very dense, mive nuclei!