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I present an overview of my recent work on the feeding of supermassive black holes (SMBH, the monster) in the nuclei of galaxies. This feeding is responsible to turn a ''quiescent¡± galaxy into an active one, and proceeds at different spatial scales. At the smallest scales of a few light days in extent, there is the unresolved accretion disk, a disk of plasma where the mass spirals in until being accreted by the SMBH. At the largest scales, of tens of thousand of light years, interactions between galaxies may be the triggering mechanism to send gas towards the center of the galaxies. At intermediate scales, there is still some debate on how the transfer of matter to the nuclear region occurs, and the best candidates seem to be large scale bars, present in at least half of the spiral galaxies. In the inner thousand light years, it is difficult to see observational evidence of inflow of gas, as in most active galaxies, this region is dominated by gas outflows. Nevertheless, in galaxies with low activity, where the outflows are weak, and using new techniques, I have been able to observe inflows in these region, which proceed along nuclear spiral arms.
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