Pulsating B and Be stars in the Magellanic Clouds
Abstract
Stellar pulsations in main-sequence B-type stars are driven by the -mechanism due to the Fe-group opacity bump. The current models do not predict the presence of instability strips in the B spectral domain at very low metallicities. As the metallicity of the Magellanic Clouds (MC) has been measured to be around Z=0.002 for the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and Z=0.007 for the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), they constitute a very suitable objects to test these predictions. The aim of this work is to investigate the existence of B-type pulsators at low metallicities, searching for short-term periodic variability in a large sample of B and Be stars from the MC with accurately determined fundamental astrophysical parameters.
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