Selection of a sample of bright southern Slowly Pulsating B Stars for long-term photometric and spectroscopic monitoring

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. W e have selected twelve bright southern stars of this sample, together with five previously known Slowly Pulsating B Stars, for spectroscopic and photo metric monitoring. These seventeen stars have spectral types ranging from B 2 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 a n extremely important one to perform seismology of intermediate-massive sta rs. 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 S lowly-Pulsating B stars was known to be a binary. Besides this star,:anothe r six of the selected Slowly Pulsating B stars turn out to be multiple syst ems. Five of these seven binaries have large rotational velocities and comp licated line-profile variations with moving:subfeatures. It is not yet clea r whether or not the binarity results in a particular spectrum of excited m odes.