Pulsating B and Be stars in the Magellanic Clouds

Abstract

Stellar pulsations in main-sequence B-type stars are driven by the $\kappa$-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 has been measured to be around $Z=0.002$ for the SMC and $Z=0.007$ for the LMC, they constitute a very suitable objects to test these predictions.

2 pages, 1 figure, contributed poster to the Proceedings of the Wroclaw HELAS Workshop, 2008 - Submitted to Communications in Asteroseismology