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We report the discovery of gas streaming motions along nuclear spiral armstowards the LINER nucleus of the galaxy NGC 6951. The observations, obtainedusing the GMOS integral field spectrograph on the Gemini North telescope,yielded maps of the flux distributions and gas kinematics in the Halpha,[NII]6584 and [SII]6717,31 emission lines of the inner 7x5 arcsec^2 of thegalaxy. This region includes a circumnuclear star-forming ring with radius500pc, a nuclear spiral inside the ring and the LINER nucleus. The kinematicsof the ionized gas is dominated by rotation, but subtraction of a kinematicmodel of a rotating exponential disk reveals deviations from circular rotationwithin the nuclear ring which can be attributed to (1) streaming motions alongthe nuclear spiral arms and (2) a bipolar outflow which seems to be associatedto a nuclear jet. On the basis of the observed streaming velocities andgeometry of the spiral arms we estimate a mass inflow rate of ionized gas of3x10^(-4) Msun/yr, which is of the order of the accretion rate necessary topower the LINER nucleus of NGC 6951. Similar streaming motions towards thenucleus of another galaxy with LINER nucleus -- NGC 1097 -- have been reportedby our group in a previous paper. Taken together, these results support ascenario in which nuclear spirals are channels through which matter istransferred from galactic scales to the nuclear region to feed the supermassiveblack hole.

Nuclear spirals as feeding channels to the Supermassive Black Hole: the case of the galaxy NGC 6951