Final answer:
The Nobel Prize was awarded to Niels Bohr for his discovery that electrons in an atom occupy specific orbits. His work built upon J.J. Thomson's discovery of the electron and Rutherford's nuclear model, leading to Bohr's Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.
Step-by-step explanation:
The Nobel Prize was won by A. Niels Bohr for finding that electrons in the atom stay in specific orbits. Bohr's model was pioneering because it suggested that these orbits had distinct sizes and energy levels, fundamentally shaping our understanding of atomic structure. Before Bohr, J.J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897 and presented the 'plum pudding model'. While significant, this model did not accurately describe electron behavior within an atom. Consequently, Thomson's discoveries earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906.
Bohr's breakthrough was elaborated upon by further experiments, which demonstrated the existence of quantized orbits. His atomic model explained the observed regularities in the spectrum of hydrogen, assuming that electrons could only occupy certain allowed orbits, and would emit or absorb energy when transitioning between them. For this monumental contribution to the field of quantum mechanics and atomic theory, Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.
Rutherford's atomic model was another piece in the puzzle and provided the groundwork for Bohr's work. While Rutherford's model featured a dense nucleus, it was incomplete because it did not fully address the electrons' behavior around the nucleus. Nevertheless, Rutherford received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 for his contributions, despite his preference for physics.