@DiversityDriven,
DiversityDriven;53853 wrote:To my knowledge it has yet to be proven?
You're mostly right. Though its existance cannot be conclusively proven, the scientific community generally accepts that the existance of Dark matter is probable.
"Dark matter may consist of dust, planets, intergalactic gas formed of ordinary matter, or of MACHOs [Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects], nonluminous bodies such as burned-out stars, black holes, and brown dwarfs; these are the so-called hot dark matter and would be dispersed uniformly throughout the universe. The discovery in 2001 of a large concentration of white dwarf stars in the halo surrounding the Milky Way indicates that these burned-out stars could represent as much as a third of the dark matter in the universe."