Magnetic flux of progenitor stars sets gamma-ray burst luminosity and variability

Long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are thought to come from the core collapse of Wolf-Rayet stars. Whereas their stellar masses M-* have a rather narrow distribution, the population of GRBs is very diverse, with gamma-ray luminosities L-gamma spanning several orders of magnitude. This suggests the existence of a 'hidden' stellar variable whose burst-to-burst variation leads to a spread in L-gamma. Whatever this hidden variable is, its variation should not noticeably affect the shape of GRB light curves, which display a constant luminosity (in a time-average sense) followed by a sharp drop at the end of the burst seen with Swift/XRT. We argue that such a hidden variable is progenitor star's large-scale magnetic flux. Shortly after the core collapse, most of stellar magnetic flux accumulates near the black hole (BH) and remains there. The flux extracts BH rotational energy and powers jets of roughly a constant luminosity, L-j. However, once BH mass accretion rate (M) over dot falls below similar to L-j/c(2), the flux becomes dynamically important and diffuses outwards, with the jet luminosity set by the rapidly declining mass accretion rate, L-j similar to (M) over dotc(2). This provides a potential explanation for the sharp end of GRBs and the universal shape of their light curves. During the GRB, gas infall translates spatial variation of stellar magnetic flux into temporal variation of L-j. We make use of the deviations from constancy in L-j to perform stellar magnetic flux 'tomography'. Using this method, we infer the presence of magnetized tori in the outer layers of progenitor stars for GRB 920513 and GRB 940210.