A high-resolution spectroscopy survey of β Cephei pulsations in bright stars

We present a study of absorption line-profile variations in early-B type near-main-sequence stars without emission lines. We have surveyed a total of 171 bright stars using the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOTSA), William Herschel Telescope (ING) and Coude Auxiliary Telescope (ESO). Our sample contains 75% of all O9.5-B2.5 III-V non-emission-line stars brighter than 5.5 mag. We obtained high signal-to-noise, high-resolution spectra of the SiIII.4560 triplet - for 125 stars of our sample we obtained more than one spectrum - and examined these for pulsational-like line-profile variations and/or structure. We conclude that about half of our sample stars show evidence for line-profile variations (LPV). We find evidence for LPV in about 65% of our sample stars brighter than V = 5.5. For stars with rotational broadening V sin i similar to 100 km s(-1), we find evidence for LPV in about 75% of the cases. We argue that it is likely that these LPV are of pulsational origin, and that hence more than half of the solar-neighbourhood O9.5-B2.5 III-V stars is pulsating in modes that can be detected with high-resolution spectroscopy. We detected LPV in 64 stars previously unknown to be pulsators, and label these stars as new ss Cep candidates. We conclude that there is no obvious difference in incidence of (pulsational) LPV for early-B type near-main-sequence stars in binaries or in OB associations, with respect to single field stars.