By 1931 we had been studying radioactive decay for 3 decades. Beta decay is one type. An electron is kicked out from the nucleus by a process that looks like this.
There are no electrons in the nucleus so the process is a bit strange. Imagine that a neutron in the nucleus becomes a proton and an electron and the electron gets ejected from the nucleus.
The problem was that neither energy nor momentum was conserved in these collisions so Wolfgang Pauli proposed the existence of another particle that is called a neutrino. Now the conservation laws work.
Here are some examples. The top one is what we use in carbon dating.
More on neutrinos:
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