The discovery of β Cephei stars in low metallicity environments, as
well as the difficulty in theoretically explaining the excitation of the
pulsation modes observed in some β Cephei and hybrid SPB-β Cephei
pulsators, suggest that the ``iron opacity bump'' provided by stellar models
could be underestimated. We analyze the effect of uncertainties in the opacity
computations and in the solar metal mixture, on the excitation of pulsation
modes in B-type stars. We carry out a pulsational stability analysis for four
grids of main-sequence models with masses between 2.5 and 12 M⊙
computed with OPAL and OP opacity tables and two different metal mixtures.
We find that in a typical β Cephei model the OP opacity is 25% larger
than OPAL in the region where the driving of pulsation modes occurs.
Furthermore, the difference in the Fe mass fraction between the two metal
mixtures considered is of the order of 20%. The implication on the excitation
of pulsation modes is non-negligible: the blue border of the SPB instability
strip is displaced at higher effective temperatures, leading to a larger number
of models being hybrid SPB-β Cephei pulsators. Moreover, higher overtone
p-modes are excited in β Cephei models and unstable modes are found in a
larger number of models for lower metallicities, in particular β Cephei
pulsations are also found in models with Z=0.01.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letter