  HESS J1616-508 is one of the brightest emitters in the TeV sky. Recent
observations with the IBIS/ISGRI telescope on board 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 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% 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 VHE 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.
