We find a new method to deduce nuclear radii from proton-nucleus elastic scattering data. In this method a nucleus is viewed as a "black" sphere. A diffraction pattern of protons by this sphere is equivalent to that of the Fraunhofer diffraction by a circular hole of the same radius embedded in a screen. We determine the black sphere radius in such a way as to reproduce the empirical value of the angle of the observed first diffraction peak. It is useful to identify this radius multiplied by 3/5 with the root-mean-square matter radius of the target nucleus. For most of stable isotopes of masses heavier than 50, it agrees, within the error bars, with the values that were deduced in previous elaborate analyses from the data obtained at proton incident energies higher than ∼ 800 MeV.PACS numbers: 21.10. Gv, 24.10.Ht, 25.40.Cm Size of atomic nuclei, one of the most fundamental nuclear properties, remains to be determined precisely. Most popularly, the size is deduced from electron and proton elastic scattering off nuclei [1,2,3,4,5]. The charge radii are well determined due to our full understanding of the underlying electromagnetic interactions [5,6,7], while deduction of the matter radii from the proton-nucleus scattering data depends on the scattering theory, which is more or less approximate in the sense that the nucleon-nucleon interactions involved are not fully understood. During the past three decades there have been many efforts of deducing the matter density distributions, which are based on various scattering theories incorporating empirical nucleon-nucleon scattering amplitudes, such as Glauber theory [1,3] and nonrelativistic and relativistic optical potential methods [8,9,10,11]. A systematic analysis of the data for a large number of nuclides, however, is still missing. In this paper we propose a method to deduce the root-mean-square (rms) matter radii, which is powerful enough to allow us to perform such a systematic analysis. This method, in which we assume that the target nucleus is completely absorptive to the incident proton and hence acts like a "black" sphere, is far simpler than the conventional methods. This approximation was originally used by Placzek and Bethe [12] in describing the elastic scattering of fast neutrons.The present method is useful for heavy stable nuclei for which the proton elastic scattering data are present, as we shall see. In the conventional framework to deduce the rms radius, one tries to reproduce empirical data for the differential cross section for scattering angles covering several diffraction maxima [1,4,13], whereas, in the present method, one has only to analyze the data around a maximum in the small angle regime. Remarkably, these two methods turn out to be similar in the deducibility of the radius.Elastic scattering data for more neutron-rich unstable nuclei are expected to be provided by radioactive ion beam facilities, such as GSI and Radioactive Ion Beam Factory in RIKEN. In a possible scheme, a beam of unstable nuclei, such as Ni and Sn isotopes, creat...