HESS J1616-508: likely to be powered by PSR J1617-5055

HESS J1616-508 is one of the brightest emitters in the TeV sky. Recent observations with the IBISASGRI telescope onboard the INTEGRAL spacecraft have revealed that a young, nearby and energetic pulsar, PSR J1617-5055, is a powerful emitter of soft gamma-rays in the 20-100 keV domain. In this paper, we present an analysis of all available data from the INTEGRAL, Swift, BeppoSAX and XMM-Newton telescopes with a view to assessing the most likely counterpart to the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) source. We find that the energy source that fuels the X/gamma-ray emissions is derived from the pulsar, both on the basis of the positional morphology, the timing evidence and the energetics of the system. Likewise the 1.2 per cent of the pulsar's spin-down energy loss needed to power the 0. 1-10 TeV emission is also fully consistent with other HESS sources known to be associated with pulsars. The relative sizes of the X/gamma-ray and very high energy sources are consistent with the expected lifetimes against synchrotron and Compton losses for a single source of parent electrons emitted from the pulsar. We find that no other known object in the vicinity could be reasonably considered as a plausible counterpart to the HESS source. We conclude that there is good evidence to assume that the HESS J1616-508 source is driven by PSR J1617-5055 in which a combination of synchrotron and inverse-Compton processes combine to create the observed morphology of a broad-band emitter from keV to TeV energies.