[will_brown]

That was exactly the early thought and why the commonly accepted image of an atom with a nucleous and orbiting electrons looks just like a solar system.

Of course that’s not at all what atoms look like or how they behave.

[pbhjpbhj]

Do you have a source for that?

AIUI Rutherford's model focussed the mass in the nucleus based-on/inspired-by Nagaoka's Saturnian model. Then Bohr's model specifically put electrons in orbit but they were there to explain atomic emission spectra and so needed to move between orbits - not at all like planets.

I think the thought was that electrons orbited a nucleus in a "planetary" way, rather than them being actual nano-scale planets.