Accreting supermassive black holes can produce more electromagnetic and kinetic
luminosities than the combined stellar luminosity of an entire galaxy. Most of the power
output from an Active Galactic Nucleus is released close to the black hole, and
therefore studying the inner accretion flow--at the intersection of inflow and
outflow--is essential for understanding how black holes grow and how they affect their
surrounding environments. In this talk, I will present a new way of probing these
environments, through X-ray reverberation mapping, which allows us to map the gas
falling on to black holes and measure the effects of strongly curved spacetime close to
the event horizon. In addition to persistently accreting black holes, Tidal Disruption
Events, where a star gets ripped apart by the strong tidal forces of a supermassive
black hole, allow us to probe the innermost region around black holes that would
otherwise appear dormant. The stellar debris can accrete at rates exceeding the
Eddington limit, and so, these transient events also provide a tool for probing extreme
accretion and the fast, massive outflows that ensue. New spectral and timing studies of
black holes are changing how we understand accretion and ejection in time-variable and
transient systems, and thanks to upcoming instruments, like XARM, ESA”Ēs Athena
Observatory and LSST, the future is bright.