How can I run a terminal command from a program?

I have a small ruby program that I'm working on at the moment (Pure ruby, not rails), which crawls a small portion of the web for certain movies. Is there a recommended way to, for example, when I run the script from my windows terminal, that it will open up a browser with the url that I extracted?

I know start 'some url' works from the windows terminal but im just wondering if there's a way to invoke a method like this directly from a ruby script.