1999A&A...343..872A

The photometric experiment on Hipparcos has led to the discovery of, among other types of variables, a large amount of new Slowly Pulsating B Stars. We have selected twelve bright southern stars of this sample, together with five previously known Slowly Pulsating B Stars, for spectroscopic and photometric monitoring. These seventeen stars have spectral types ranging from B2 up to B9 and thus fully cover the instability strip. We here present the results of a preliminary analysis of our data and show that our sample is an extremely important one to perform seismology of intermediate-massive stars. In particular, we find that all but one of the selected stars exhibit clear line-profile variability. The broader-lined Slowly Pulsating B Stars tend to have more complex line-profile variations. One of the previously known Slowly Pulsating B stars was known to be a binary. Besides this star, another six of the selected Slowly Pulsating B stars turn out to be multiple systems. Five of these seven binaries have large rotational velocities and complicated line-profile variations with moving subfeatures. It is not yet clear whether or not the binarity results in a particular spectrum of excited modes.